The FORCE11 2019 conference will include a Research Software hackathon on ‘Making software a first-class citizen in the scholarly world’.

Force 11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that aims to use information technology more effectively in modern scholarly communication.

The 2019 conference, to be held in Edinburgh on 16th and 17th October, will include sessions on the use of open source software in science, on code publication and peer review, and on data mining.

The hackathon will be held on the first day of the conference and will investigate different approaches to making software identifiable, citable, reusable, and reproducible. The organisers hope to “make progress toward a common understanding of the issues and toward a shared set of guidelines”.

Activities will depend on the interests of participants, but can include identifiers for software, metadata interoperability, data quality, and policies and incentives.

The organisers invite “researchers, librarians, Wikipedians, digital curators, professional societies, publishers, archives, indices, funders, institutions, and more generally all persons interested in software as a research artefact” to participate.