Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare team up to fix the citation of code in academia
The Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare – a repository where academics can upload, share and cite their research materials – is starting to tackle the problem. The trio have developed a system so researchers can easily sync their GitHub releases with a Figshare account. It creates a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) automatically, which can then be referenced and checked by other people.
Discussion of the above article on YCombinator
…it always make me cringe when privately held companies want to define an “open standard” for scientific citations that (surprise!) relies completely on their proprietary infrastructure. I still remember the case of Mendeley, which promised to build an open repository for research documents, and which is now a subsidiary of Elsevier, an organization that does not really embrace “open science”, to put it mildly.
Tool developed at CERN makes software citation easier
Researchers working at CERN have developed a tool that allows source code from the popular software development site GitHub to be preserved and cited through the CERN-hosted online repository Zenodo….
Now, people working on software in GitHub will be able to ensure that their code is not only preserved through Zenodo, but is also provided with a unique digital object identifier (DOI), just like an academic paper.
Webcite
WebCite is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future.
DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right?
So DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right? Wrong.
The examples above are useful because they help elucidate some misconceptions about the DOI itself, the nature of the DOI registration agencies and, in particular issues being raised by new RAs and new DOI allocation models.