ReproScore: Separating Readiness from Outcome in Research Software Reproducibility Assessment

Abstract: Digital libraries curate millions of research software artefacts yet lack scalable infrastructure for assessing whether those artefacts remain executable. Existing automated assessment tools treat static repository completeness -- what a repository contains -- as a proxy for execution success -- whether it runs. We term this the readiness-outcome conflation and present ReproScore, a two-tier framework that explicitly separates reproducibility readiness (RRS) from reproducibility outcome (ROS), combining them into a coverage-adaptive Composite Score (RCS). RRS comprises 26 sub-metrics across five categories; ROS provides execution-based probes when sandbox infrastructure is available; a community rubric externalises weighting priorities as versioned YAML profiles. Evaluated on 423 GitHub repositories from a large-scale ground-truth corpus spanning five failure modes, two complementary findings emerge: the environment category strongly discriminates failure mode, confirming static signals capture meaningful structural differences; yet RRS exhibits near-zero binary success correlation, empirically quantifying the readiness-outcome gap at repository scale. Together, these findings validate the architectural separation as both necessary and non-trivial, positioning ReproScore as scalable infrastructure for reproducibility-aware curation in digital library workflows.