[Bioc-devel] Zenodo DOIs for packages released (every 6 months, tied to the Bioc release)

[Leonardo Collado Torres]

Hi,

I looked at https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/ after
reading http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/15/048744 (Laurent
Gatto is the 2nd author).

It got me thinking that maybe with the Bioconductor-mirror's at GitHub
we could use Zenodo for creating DOI's of Bioconductor's packages for
every Bioconductor release. So, for example when BioC 3.3 is release,
have Bioconductor-mirror create a "release" (a git tag), which would
then lead do a new DOI from Zenodo.

It might have to be a bit more complicated. For example, maybe don't
create a new DOI for a package if it had 0 commits during the last 6
month devel cycle. Also, I don't think that a new DOI should be
created for every commit or package version bump since that would
likely be a tad confusing.

I also don't know if having DOIs for packages would increase citations
to them or simply move them away from the papers (if a package has
been described in a paper) to the Zenodo DOIs. That is, would someone
cite the paper and the package DOI? Or just one of the two?

Anyhow, it got me curious and would like to know what others think about it.

Best,
Leo

Leonardo Collado Torres, PhD Candidate
Department of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins University
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Website: http://lcolladotor.github.io/about.html