FAIR-IMPACT, a project that aims to promote and facilitate the adoption of FAIR principles for research software, has recently achieved a significant milestone. The project has developed 17 metrics that can be used to automate the assessment of research software against the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles). These metrics build on the outputs of the RDA/ReSA/FORCE11 FAIR for Research Software Working Group and existing guidelines and metrics for research software to define metrics for the assessment of the FAIR4RS Principles.

The development work has been continued by fully implementing two of the metrics, FRSM-13 (dependencies, build and configuration) and FRSM-15 (licensing information), as well as providing skeletons for many of the other metrics. The project team extended the F-UJI tool, which was originally developed for assessing datasets, to include tests for the research software metrics, and evaluated these discipline-agnostic tests against a collection of reference repositories provided by FAIR-EASE. Additionally, discipline-specific versions of the metrics were implemented based on the version of the metrics defined by CESSDA and evaluated against a collection of reference repositories provided by CESSDA.

This milestone comes from Task 5.2 (FAIR metrics for research software) on "Practical tests for automated FAIR software assessment in a disciplinary context" and is part of Work Package 5 on "Metrics, Certification and Guidelines" within the FAIR-IMPACT project. The development of these metrics is a significant step forward in promoting the adoption of FAIR principles for research software, which will help to improve the quality, transparency, and reproducibility of research.