At Open Research Europe, all research outputs deserve proper recognition. That’s why Open Research Europe publishes many diverse article types, from traditional Research Articles to less common formats such as Software Tool Articles, Data Notes, and beyond.
In this blog, we outline what a Software Tool Article is and how publishing one could increase recognition and improve the visibility and impact of your research.
What are Software Tool Articles?
Software Tool Articles are research outputs that enable researchers and software engineers to describe their research software or tools developed from existing software. They should include the rationale for the development of the tool and details of the code used for its construction. The article should provide examples of suitable input data sets and include an example of the output that can be expected from the tool and how this output should be interpreted.
Why should I publish a Software Tool Article as part of my research project?
A lot of published research isn’t reproducible because authors haven’t fully shared the tools they used, including the software they created. Software Tool Articles aim to solve this issue. Sharing research software, sample data, and guidance for analysis and interpretation makes it easier for reviewers and readers to reproduce your work. This not only improves the credibility of your findings but also promotes the wider movement toward reproducibility best practices in research.
Software Tool Articles are fully citable and undergo peer review, meaning you can get the credit you deserve for all your research outputs. Once it’s passed peer review, your article will benefit from increased visibility through indexing in PubMed and Scopus. We welcome Software Tool Articles written in any open source programming language, including Python, R, and C, and our Platform supports code syntax highlighting, so your code is fully readable in the body of your article.
Software Tool Articles on Open Research Europe
Software Tool Articles published on Open Research Europe are available as citable publications. Below, we’ve highlighted some examples of Software Tool Articles published on Open Research Europe.
STRAIGHTMORPH: A Voice Morphing Tool for Research in Voice Communication Sciences
The ability to parametrically manipulate the physical characteristics of basic sensory stimuli – e.g., the direction of a moving bar on a screen, or the frequency of a pure tone—has played a major role in experimental psychology. However, what is easy to perform for simple synthetic stimuli becomes much harder with complex naturalistic stimuli such as faces or voices.
The availability of face morphing software has resulted in important advances in our understanding of the perceptual and cerebral representations of face identity and emotion. A similar implementation thankfully exists in the voice modality. STRAIGHTMORPH provides a relatively simple but highly versatile tool to generate parametrically-controlled, high-quality sound interpolations between voice samples – and beyond – for behavioural, neuroimaging, or electrophysiological experiments.
The following Software Tool Article introduces the user-friendly STRAIGHTMORPH software and a short tutorial on its use with examples.
Read the full Software Tool Article here.
SentemQC – A novel and cost-efficient method for quality assurance and quality control of high-resolution frequency sensor data in fresh waters
The growing use of sensors in fresh waters for water quality measurements generates an increasingly large amount of data that requires quality assurance (QA)/quality control (QC) before the results can be exploited. Such a process is often resource-intensive and may not be consistent across users and sensors.
SentemQC is an open-source Python tool designed to ensure the quality of high-frequency sensor data. The purpose of the method is to clean and perform quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) on large volumes of data, such as high-frequency data with data points down to every minute. SentemQC is a valuable tool for maintaining data quality; however, it should be used in tandem with other software as part of a broader QC-QA process.
Read the full Software Tool Article here.
