Software Curation & Archiving: A Data Curator's Perspective of the Last 10 Years

It can be argued that research software, that is, software that is used or created in support of scholarly research activities, is as important to supporting the understanding, verification, and reproduction of research results as journal articles and associated research data. However, it has often been relegated to a second-class research output. This has led to a wide variety of initiatives to raise it to a level that gives it the recognition it needs. They have ranged from work towards raising its profile as a first-class research product in the eyes of the research community, to the development of tools and resources for data managers and curators to help improve the reproducibility and reuse of potential of research products. The aim of this talk is to briefly review some of the software curation and archiving work of the past 10 years from a data curator’s perspective. At the end of the presentation, my hope is that the audience will have gained a glimpse of the software curation field from one practitioner’s point of view, learned about projects or tools they might not have heard (or forgotten) about, and leave with some thoughts on how they might continue to evolve in the field from wherever they are situated professionally.