Support REUSE Specification

[cmeessen]

We have been applying the REUSE Specification to the Research Software Directory to indicate copyright and individual licenses on a per-file basis. Unfortunately, howfairis does not detect licenses when they are specified according to the REUSE specification and fails.

We were wondering whether it is planned to add support for the REUSE specification?

Details about the specification can be found on their webpage under Specification.

[juhannc]

I would also endorse supporting REUSE as it is a strong step towards clear licensing, something FAIR stands for.
R1.1 says:

(Meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license.

as well as

Software and its associated metadata have independent, clear and accessible usage licenses compatible with the software dependencies.

Both guidelines can be easily achieved using REUSE instead of having a single license file.

I can understand, that checking for REUSE compliance is harder than just scaning for a single LICENSE file. But maybe it would be enough (for the beginning) to check for signs of REUSE, i.e., a LICENSES folder, a REUSE.toml, etc. In general it will probably best to offload the actual compliance check to REUSE itself, either by using their web-based check or their CLI tool reuse lint.