HERMES: Helmholtz Rich Metadata Software Publication

Project Partners: DLR, FZJ, HZDR

HERMES is an acronym for “HElmholtz Rich MEtadata Software publication”.

To satisfy the principles of FAIR research software, software sustainability and software citation, research software must be formally published. Publication repositories make this possible and provide published software versions with unique and persistent identifiers. However, software publication is still a tedious, mostly manual process and impedes promoting software to first class research citizenship.

To streamline software publication, this project develops automated workflows to publish research software with rich metadata. Our tooling utilizes continuous integration solutions to retrieve, collate, and process existing metadata in source repositories, and publish them on publication repositories, including checks against existing metadata requirements. To accompany the tooling and enable researchers to easily reuse it, the project also provides comprehensive documentation and templates for widely used CI solutions.

Many, if not most, publication repositories cannot be labeled “research software ready” today (2022). In addition to the deposition workflows, this project cooperates with the upstream InvenioRDM and Dataverse projects. We are working on the necessary bits to achieve full readiness for these and put a nice badge on ‘em.