Author: Neil Chue Hong
In 2015 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) formulated the Sustainable Development Goals or Global Goals as a collection of seventeen interlinked objectives designed to serve as a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future". They emphasise the interconnected environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainable development by putting sustainability at their centre. This future global development framework aims to guide decision making, goals, and indicators to measure progress, and unify disparate efforts around shared goals.
As a guiding framework,the Software Sustainability Institute have discussed developing a similar small set of goals / principles that we and others can adopt and implement. The idea is that the sustainable development of research software is multi-faceted, and therefore cannot be tackled by addressing a single goal or approach, or by a single project or organisation. What we are aiming for is a short set of goals we believe every research software project should strive for, that if many projects and organisations collectively adopted them, would make research software better for all - what makes research software development “societally good”.
Helping your team
- 1 FAIR: Reusable by as many users as possible.
- 2 Secure: Respect data privacy and assume attacks
- 3 Maintainable: Easy to adapt and to correct faults
Helping your peers
- 4 Reproducible: Enable trust in research
- 5 Recognition: Reward all roles and develop the next generation
- 6 Inclusive: Accessible and supportive of a broad community
Helping the world
- 7 Responsible: Build to reduce impact on our environment
- 8 Open & global: Transcend national and discipline boundaries
- 9 Humanist: Unbiased, ethical and in support of humanity
Version 1.0 (5 September 2023) - (c) 2023 University of Edinburgh. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11494174