Software products uniques identifiers

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Software products uniques identifiers

One of the features discussed during the concept phase is the possibility of assigning unique IDs to software products to make them citable in the context of scientific publications. A bit like the DOI codes used for papers for example. This feature has been considered very interesting by several people. However, this functionality goes beyond ScienceSoft itself and requires a larger collaboration involving experts on digital publishing. The goal for the design phase is to startorganizing the discussion around this topic among interested experts and raise awareness about the initiative.Please, feel free to post here your interests, ideas and proposals.

Unique identifiers for software

This is an area where we in the UK Software Sustainability Institute have been doing work to gain a better understanding of the challenges.A particular challenge with respect to software is that the boundaries of a "piece" of software are becoming less distinct as web services, workflows, and distributed systems increase in usage. So what do you assign an identifier to?Therefore we get to the central question: are we aiming to cite software so that we can give/receive credit, or are we aiming to cite software to improve repeatability/replayability/reviewability?The approach we take would differ slightly depending on our main goal.Some previous thoughts on this from the SSI and its contributors:

  • Software Impact - the differences from datasets from Beyond Impact workshop (article)
  • Describing the software you used in your research (SSI Green Paper)
  • Where Does It Go From Here? The Place of Software in Digital Repositories from Open Repositories 2012 (slides, paper)
  • The Journal of Open Research Software - a metajournal for software (FAQ)

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