FAIRsharing record for: FAIR Principles for Research Software - R3. Software meets domain-relevant community standards

This FAIRsharing record describes: 'R3. Software meets domain-relevant community standards' states that software, including its documentation and license, should meet domain-relevant community standards and coding practices (e.g., choice of programming language, standards for testing, usage of file formats, accessibility [in the sense of usable by as many people as possible]) that enable reuse. While the FAIR4RS Principles do not specify particular community standards, the intent is to ensure that practitioners are aware of what others are doing and using in the community, e.g., through initiatives like FAIRsharing (Sansone et al., 2019), whilst acknowledging that community standards are (and should be) under constant development. Communities can encompass research domains, programming languages, and technical approaches. Examples of community standards might include: BioSchemas from ELIXIR for describing resources in the life sciences and schema.org for general description of resources; Common Workflow Language; and the package managers commonly used by a programming language such as Maven (Java), npm (Javascript), PyPI (Python) and CRAN (R). It is important to note that the FAIR Guiding Principles address research outputs, not research processes, so
standards should also be limited to best practice about the software itself, not the process of designing, developing, or maintaining it, such as the R community standards for creating packages or the PEP 8 Style Guide for Python Code.