Introduction
Our goal is to promote scientific software into an identifiable, citable, and preservable object. We are focusing upon the needs of two of the most important roles researchers play in the scholarly ecosystem: authors of scholarly manuscripts and developers of scientific software. We are building a technical framework and promoting a set of social practices that will “fix” problems associated with software citations.
Problems
Principles
This project’s solutions are bounded by the “Force 11 Software Citation Principles.” If these principles are teneable for the astronomy community then we will implement solutions that ascribe to them. The degree to which new workflows match or diverge from existing ways of citing references.
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Importance: Software should be considered a legitimate and citable product of research. Software citations should be accorded the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research products, such as publications and data; they should be included in the metadata of the citing work, for example in the reference list of a journal article, and should not be omitted or separated. Software should be cited on the same basis as any other research product such as a paper or a book, that is, authors should cite the appropriate set of software products just as they cite the appropriate set of papers.
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Credit and attribution: Software citations should facilitate giving scholarly credit and normative, legal attribution to all contributors to the software, recognizing that a single style or mechanism of attribution may not be applicable to all software.
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Unique identification: A software citation should include a method for identification that is machine actionable, globally unique, interoperable, and recognized by at least a community of the corresponding domain experts, and preferably by general public researchers.
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Persistence: Unique identifiers and metadata describing the software and its disposition should persist—even beyond the lifespan of the software they describe.
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Accessibility: Software citations should facilitate access to the software itself and to its associated metadata, documentation, data, and other materials necessary for both humans and machines to make informed use of the referenced software.
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Specificity: Software citations should facilitate identification of, and access to, the specific version of software that was used. Software identification should be as specific as necessary, such as using version numbers, revision numbers, or variants such as platforms.
Reference for Principles text and development: Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. (2016) Software citation principles. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86