Beyond FAIR: A Fitness Function Framework for Sustainable Research Software
Authors add environmental and security fitness functions to FAIR-based research-software sustainability checks.
The paper argues that FAIR principles do not cover every sustainability concern for research software. It extends a prior fitness-function framework with environmental functions for resource efficiency and execution footprint, and security functions for dependency health, vulnerability exposure, and secure configuration. The resulting framework treats sustainability as spanning FAIR compliance, environmental responsibility, and long-term security.
- FAIR omits environmental cost and long-term software security.
- Adds fitness functions for resource use and execution footprint.
- Security checks cover dependencies, vulnerability exposure, and configuration.
- Treats sustainability as continuous multidimensional assessment.
Full article137 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Research software sustainability is often assessed through the FAIR principles: findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. While important, FAIR does not cover all relevant sustainability concerns. Research software should also be environmentally responsible and secure over time. Excessive resource consumption increases environmental cost, while insecure software creates maintenance overhead, technical debt and barriers to reuse. To this end, in this paper, we extend a previously proposed fitness function framework for sustainable research software beyond FAIR. We introduce two additional sets of fitness functions: environmental functions targeting resource efficiency and execution footprint, and security functions targeting dependency health, vulnerability exposure and secure configuration. Together, these functions broaden continuous software assessment from FAIR compliance to a more complete view of sustainability. The resulting framework treats research software sustainability as a multidimensional property that includes FAIR, environmental responsibility and long-term security.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09580