Sharing Software

Why share your software/code?

• Accelerates innovation as it is easier to receive feedback that you can learn from and use to improve the software

• Provide evidence for your scientific claims and increases the reproducibility of your work, as other people can now check the work

• Saves time and resources when other people do not have to reinvent the wheel

• Increases impact and visibility of your research (software can also be cited!)

• Facilitates collaboration

• Improves sustainability as you’re not the only one who can maintain the software and contributions can be made by community members

• Open Source Software is encouraged by the UNESCO recommendations

• Your funder may require you to share the underlying software/code of your publications

• Your software may be checked during peer review (see Nature Human Behaviour)

• Your work is probably relying on open source software to a certain degree, so it would be good to contribute back to the community!

TU Delft and Open Software

TU Delft encourages sharing of your software/code and the TU Delft Research Software Policy preapproves the following licenses: MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, AGPL, LGPL, EUPL, CC0 when you share your software.

When sharing your software you should also share a version of the software using a data repository. You can either use 4TU.ResearchData or another repository to share your software/code:

4TU.ResearchData

• Log in right top using TU Delft credentials

• Select ‘Add a New Dataset’:

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• Add relevant metadata in the information fields

• Under the header ‘Files’ you can find the instructions to publish directly from a Git repository under ‘Software deposit’:

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Other repositories

• Upload your software in another repository (for example: Zenodo).

• Go to https://pure.tudelft.nl/admin/ and log in using TU Delft credentials

• Select Datasets/Software -> Software

• Fill out the metadata in the information fields and add DOI, select license and save the information

Copyright

Ideally you also add a copyright transfer to the shared software (see slide 14 in this presentation), for example:

Technische Universiteit Delft hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program “Name program” (one line description of the content or function) written by the Author(s).

You can then add a copyright notice to assert your own rights:

© YEAR, [NAME], [REFERENCE project, grant or study if desired]

You can only add copyright transfer to software that you share under an open source software license.

Feedback

Before sharing your code/software in a data repository it can be helpful to ask a colleague or collaborator to review it.

Critical elements for usable software (Doherty et al. 2023)

• License

• Documentation: Usage examples are an integral part of the documentation that is often ignored, but can make a significant difference for the user. Well-structured documentation such as (https://documentation.divio.com/) is essential for software to be usable.

• Versioning: If there are multiple releases of code, it should be bundled in releases and accompanied by changelog and release notes.

• Deployability: There needs to be an installation routine available that takes care of compilation and dependency resolution in an automated fashion (see also executable containers so that users can start immediately).

• Avoiding proprietary code base: software that depends on licensed code bases creates severe barriers to portability and adoption.

More information

• Full presentation +recording of how to publish software at TU Delft (from 23:14 onwards)
• TU Delft Digital Competence Center FAIR software checklist
• See also the post on licensing
• Why it’s worth making computational methods easy to use
• Using GitHub Container Registry + Zenodo