DARIAH meta hosting: Sharing software in a distributed infrastructure

Research infrastructures have become an everyday tool for doing science. They constitute a cost-effective, quick, and increasingly easy-to-use collaboration tool. So far the focus was on sharing resources (especially data) and on offering a (rigid) set of services for processing and accessing the resources. It becomes clear, however, that there is a demand from the users to share not only the data they have gathered or created but also the software they implemented. Such a sharing has the potential to speed-up the scientific discovery. But only if the software runs i.e, if it can be applied by other researchers to new problems. Unfortunately, it happens often that the software implemented in a project is only understandable and deployable by the authors. In this paper we will address the problem of sharing services (e.g. new data analysis tools) between users and also touch on the problem of sharing services between infrastructures, for instance to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchange. Our goal was to increase the sustainability of the developed research software by enabling an easy extension of research infrastructures beyond the rigid set of services towards flexible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. We share the initial experiences gained during the implementation of such a meta hosting service for DARIAH-DE research infrastructure.