About

Software is central to contemporary scientific research, and as a result should be findable, understandable and citable. This How-to Guide seeks to clarify the practical steps a software creator can follow to achieve this outcome.

This web resource is paired with a manuscript in preparation that describes the Why and How of making software findable and citable. This resource expands on the How and adds Examples for each step.

The steps

Have publicly accessible source code

Add your source code to an open source repository with version control.

Select a suitable licence

Add a licence to ensure others can reuse your software.

Give your tool or workflow an informative name

Software names should be short, unique, searchable, and provide info about the software while avoiding a prefix (e.g. `bio`) and complex characters.

State purpose, function and requirements

Document your tool or workflow to clearly describe purpose, function and requirements. E.g. annotations, standard metadata files, long form text descriptions, complete user documentation and / or software publication.

Register

Add your tools and workflows to a registry that is well known and best practice.

Have an ORCID

Generate an ORCID and use this identifier to connect your collective works on tools and workflows.

Generate and use digital object identifiers (DOI)

Generate digital object identifiers (DOI) for your tools and workflows and use these to link to your software.

Include clear citation instructions

Provide clear citation instructions to users of your tool or workflow, for example by using a standard file (e.g. CITATION.cff).

Cite other tools and workflows

Follow others citation instructions, and use DOIs to refer to software that you either use or on which your software depends.

Join or align with a community effort

Align to, follow, or join a community effort that is relevant to your software. For example, coding language, platform, or scientific domain specific communities.

Please cite this guide as follows

[Citation information goes here]

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Australian BioCommons which is enabled by NCRIS via Bioplatforms Australia funding.

This guide makes use of the ELIXIR toolkit theme

The authors would like to acknowledge Marion Shadbolt (@mshadbolt) for developing the referencing approach that is being reused for this web resource.