2026-08-12

nfdi.software aimed at creating a central marketplace to improve access to NFDI research software, addressing the needs of various scientific disciplines for sustainable research software use and development.

Duration: 01.11.2024 - 31.12.2025 (funding concluded after the Initialisation Phase)

Target Group: 

• researchers who want to discover, find and evaluate software for their specific research questions
• research software engineers who want to promote their own software or who want to find, reuse and co-develop other software

Main Achievements of the Initialisation Phase: 

1. Requirements Analysis: Needs and community-specific requirements were collected in collaboration with consortia and basic services through workshops, discussions and prototyping. The results of a survey with 51 participants from 23 NFDI consortia can be found in 
   1. Höffner, K., & Löbe, M. (2025). Descriptive review of already existing solutions, plans and policies regarding software marketplaces in NFDI consortia (1.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15424329.
2. Prototype: The proof-of-concept service developed during the initialisation phase can be explored and tested right on nfdi.software. It is based on the Research Software Directory (RSD) and provides functionalities for harvesting and retrieving detailed information about software along with related publications, people, and projects. Programmatic access is possible via PostgREST and Swagger. The frontend code base can be re-used from https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/nfdi.software/rsd.
3. Software metadata and FAIRness of research software:
   1. Various metadata vocabularies have been explored to provide an overview of relevant metadata schemas (and available crosswalks) of the different NFDI consortia and of NFDI basic services: Marčić, A., Hensen, K. E., & Akyaa, I. (2025). nfdi.software Deliverable 3.1 (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15275332.
   2. nfdi.software assessed how properties of the CodeMeta schema support FAIR4RS principles and some quality indicators: Venkatesh, S., Jafarbigloo, A., Gan, L., & Castro, L. J. (2025). A preliminary assessment on CodeMeta support for FAIR and quality characteristics for Research Software (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17897111.
4. Integrated sources: During the runtime of the initialisation phase, the data sources Helmholtz Software, Research Software Directory and the Text+ RSD instance for software in the field of digital scholarly editions were integrated into the service. In addition, an nfdi.software collection has been set up.
5. Metadata efforts like Knowledge Graphs and Jupyter4NFDI as well as the potential for integration of nfdi.software with other basic service candidates were evaluated.
   1. Castro, L. J., Bleier, A., Baum, R., Hagemeier, B., Michels, T., Pempe, W., Reinhardt, M., Voß, J., Venkatesh, S., Windeck, J., & Zacharias, M. (2025). Initial concept for metadata exchange between nfdi.software and other Base4NFDI services. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15676106.
6. Participation in/ organisation of events: The nfdi.software team promoted the initialisation phase activities and the resulting prototype in major NFDI events to reach their communities.
   1. 2026, April 15, final presentation in Section Common Infrastructures, Zenodo.
   2. 2025, August 26-27, Poster Presentation at CoRDI - 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, Aachen, Germany, ‘Against the blasphemous habit of reinventing the software wheel time and time again’, Zenodo.
   3. 2025, September 1, NFDITalk: ​Introducing the nfdi.software Basic Service, Recording on Youtube.
   4. 2024, December 4th, Contribution to the Base4NFDI Services Roadshow, Recording on Youtube.
   5. 2024, November 20-21, Contribution to Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B2024) ‘nfdi.software - unlock software, activate research data.’, Event page with abstract.
   6. 2024, September 30, Talks co-organised by NFDI WGs infra-RSE and metadata-RSMETA ‘Research Software Ecosystem & machine-readable Software Management Plans’, Event page with abstract.