Your tasks: Digital Software Identifiers (DOI) for Software

What is a Digital Object Identifier?

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or a handle used to uniquely identify various objects, such as journal articles, research reports, dataset or software, standardised by the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO).

A DOI fits within the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) system, and also resolves to its target - the information object to which the DOI refers. This is achieved by binding the DOI to metadata about the object, such as a URL where the object is located.

Obtaining a DOI for software has become increasingly popular to indicate to others how to cite your software (either in a publication or as an independent way of referring to your software).

There are many services that can “mint” DOIs, i.e. perform the process of creating and assigning a DOI to an object. We will explore how you can do that for your software using Zenodo, a general-purpose open archive and publishing repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN.

How can I get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for code using Zenodo?

Description

Zenodo’s DOI versioning feature allows users to create a concept DOI (which represents the software package as a whole, including all its versions) and multiple release DOIs for software packages (with each DOI representing a specific version of the software package). In other words, the concept DOI is a reference to a software project as a whole, while the software version DOI is a reference to a particular software release.

Considerations

• While this is not mandatory, using GitHub as your software repository can help with issuing DOIs for your software due to its integration with Zenodo. If you are not using GitHub, you will need to upload each software version to Zenodo manually.
• You want to publish a software release of your code (e.g. using semantic versioning).
• You need an account on Zenodo and you can create is using your GitHub account (effectively linking the two). If you already have a Zenodo account that is not linked to your GitHub account - you can always link them from Zenodo later.

Solutions

• If you do not have a Zenodo account - create a Zenodo account now preferably with your GitHub account.
• If you already have a Zenodo account, link your GitHub account to Zenodo as follows:
  • Go to Zenodo website.
  • Navigate to your Zenodo profile page.
  • Select the GitHub tab, then click on Connect.
  • Authorise Zenodo to access your GitHub account
  • Choose which repository you would like to create a DOI for under the repositories sections
    • You may need to scroll down to find the repository if you have access to many repositories
• From Github, create a release for the software repository you have enabled:
  • Go to your repository software repository on GitHub.
  • Click on Releases and then Draft a new release button.
  • Remember to use a version number (semantic versioning is commonly used but there are other schemes such as CalVer which is date based)
• Zenodo will automatically archive this release due to its integration with GitHub:
  • Once your GitHub repository is linked to Zenodo, any new release you publish on GitHub will be archived by Zenodo.
  • Zenodo will automatically issue a DOI for each new release.
• Get the DOI:
  • After making the release in GitHub, go back to the GitHub option on Zenodo for your account where you will see your repository archived with a DOI assigned to it. If you click on it - you will be taken to the Zenodo record for your software. You can see the Zenodo DOI badge under Details:

• Copy the badge to the README file in your software repository in GitHub:
  • Click on the blue DOI badge - a window will pop up with badge in various formats.
  • Copy the Markdown version to your README. It will show in GitHub as follows:

Also check:

• GitHub’s Documentation on Referencing and Citing Content
• GitHub Integration FAQ on Zenodo
• Making code citable with Zenodo and GitHub guide from Software Sustainability Institute

Related pages

Skip tool table

Tools and resources on this page

Skip national tools table

National resources

Tools and resources tailored to users in different countries.

Contributors

How to cite this page