Generate and use digital object identifiers (DOI)

A DOI is a persistent identifier, and allows unambiguous linking to your software.

How?

Below we share our recommendations.

• Scientific journal articles will come with a DOI, if you choose to publish your software in a journal. See also the documentation step.
• If you have shared your code publicly via a repository on GitHub, you can use Zenodo (European Organization For Nuclear Research & OpenAIRE, 2013) to archive your repository and issue this archive a DOI. Currently, Zenodo will also issue a new DOI for your repository each time a new GitHub release is created.
• There are over 400,000 software DOIs in Zenodo (Fenner, 2018; DataCite Commons, n.d.), and so to distinguish specific software artefacts like workflows and make them more visible, you can either use a registry that is able to mint DOIs, such as WorkflowHub, or add your Zenodo generated DOI to a registry entry to make the best use of both resources.

Example

We have included examples of publications where WorkflowHub DOIs are included: providing persistent links to workflows:

• (Satgunaseelan et al., 2022)
• (Atasoy et al., 2023)
• (Lott et al., 2022)

You can find additional examples by searching Google Scholar for the core element of the WorkflowHub DOI: 10.48546/WORKFLOWHUB.WORKFLOW.

References

1. European Organization For Nuclear Research, & OpenAIRE. (2013). Zenodo: Research. Shared. https://doi.org/10.25495/7GXK-RD71
2. Fenner, M. (2018). DOI Registrations for Software. In DataCite. https://datacite.org/blog/doi-registrations-software/
3. DataCite Commons. Retrieved November 9, 2023, from https://commons.datacite.org/statistics
4. Satgunaseelan, L., Strbenac, D., Tadi, S., Nguyen, K., Wykes, J., Palme, C. E., Low, T.-H. (H., Yang, J. Y. H., Clark, J. R., & Gupta, R. (2022). Viral Integration Plays a Minor Role in the Development and Prognostication of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Cancers, 14(21), 5213. https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers14215213
5. Atasoy, M., Scott Jr., W. T., Van Gijn, K., Koehorst, J. J., Smidt, H., & Langenhoff, A. A. M. (2023). Microbial dynamics and bioreactor performance are interlinked with organic matter removal from wastewater treatment plant effluent. Bioresource Technology, 372, 128659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2023.128659
6. Lott, M. J., Wright, B. R., Neaves, L. E., Frankham, G. J., Dennison, S., Eldridge, M. D. B., Potter, S., Alquezar‐Planas, D. E., Hogg, C. J., Belov, K., & Johnson, R. N. (2022). Future‐proofing the koala: Synergising genomic and environmental data for effective species management. Molecular Ecology, 31(11), 3035–3055. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16446

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