Credit for Software Authors

Black and red swirling around a black hole in a computer simulation.
CU Boulder, Theoretical Astrophysics
 

Scientific research relies on software. Software written by scientists will be the foundation on which future generations must construct their understanding of how the Universe works. Software is also as distributed as it is dynamic. Versioning and authorship in these contexts are fluid, presenting new challenges for traditional publishing models and archival practices. For these reasons Wolbach Library staff do research and contribute to projects and initiatives that aim to help scientists make their software more easily citable and persistent.

CiteSoftware.org

Want to know how to cite software? Use this simple tool to understand what to do. 

Copyright Guide to Scientific Software

The Copyright Guide to Scientific Software, a joint project of the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic and the Center for Astrophysics, in association with the Software Preservation Network, aims to provide clear, easy-to-read answers to common questions about how scientific software and copyright interact. 

Credit Lost: Two Decades of Software Citation in Astronomy

Why is citing software something we need to talk about? Astronomers have been trying to cite software for years, but practices that enable machine-actionable citations have not been consistently applied to software directly. Instead, software citation behaviors developed independently from standard publication mechanisms and policies, resulting in human-readable citations that remain hidden over time and that cannot represent the influence software has had in the field. Read this case study to find out more.