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

[Laurent Gatto]

On 15 April 2016 20:59, Leonardo Collado Torres wrote:

> 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.

I don't have any strong opinion regarding DOIs for software in general,
but I am not convinced it would be a good idea to do this for the
read-only repositories in the Bioconductor-mirror org. I guess I would
probably prefer a plain link to my own repository, with its pull
requests, issues and contributors, than a DOI to a read-only repo.

Best wishes,

Laurent

> 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