Related papers: How to use Software Heritage for archiving and ref…
Software, and software source code in particular, is widely used in modern research. It must be properly archived, referenced, described and cited in order to build a stable and long lasting corpus of scientic knowledge. In this article we…
Software Heritage is the largest public archive of software source code and associated development history, as captured by modern version control systems. As of July 2023, it has archived more than 16 billion unique source code files coming…
Software Heritage is the largest existing public archive of software source code and accompanying development history. It spans more than five billion unique source code files and one billion unique commits , coming from more than 80…
Research software is an integral part of most research today and it is widely accepted that research software artifacts should be accessible and reproducible. However, the sustainable archival of research software artifacts is an ongoing…
We introduce the Software Heritage filesystem (SwhFS), a user-space filesystem that integrates large-scale open source software archival with development workflows. SwhFS provides a POSIX filesystem view of Software Heritage, the largest…
As software has become an integral part of scientific workflows, reproducible research practices must take it into account. In what way? Archiving source code is a necessary but insufficient condition. The ability to redeploy software…
Software citation contributes to achieving software sustainability in two ways: It provides an impact metric to incentivize stakeholders to make software sustainable. It also provides references to software used in research, which can be…
Context: When software is released publicly, it is common to include with it either the full text of the license or licenses under which it is published, or a detailed reference to them. Therefore public licenses, including FOSS (free, open…
Software has long been established as an essential aspect of the scientific process in mathematics and other disciplines. However, reliably referencing software in scientific publications is still challenging for various reasons. A crucial…
[Background] In large open-source software projects, development knowledge is often fragmented across multiple artefacts and contributors such that individual stakeholders are generally unaware of the full breadth of the product features.…
SAT research has a long history of source code and binary releases, thanks to competitions organized every year. However, since every cycle of competitions has its own set of rules and an adhoc way of publishing source code and binaries,…
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software…
Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…
Software is a central part of modern science, and knowledge of its use is crucial for the scientific community with respect to reproducibility and attribution of its developers. Several studies have investigated in-text mentions of software…
Scientific software registries and repositories serve various roles in their respective disciplines. These resources improve software discoverability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster…
Among the entities involved in software citation, software source code requires special attention, due to the role it plays in ensuring scientific reproducibility. To reference source code we need identifiers that are not only unique and…
Software repositories are rich sources of qualitative artifacts, including source code comments, commit messages, issue descriptions, and documentation. These artifacts offer many interesting insights when analyzed through quantitative…
One common task of developing or maintaining software is searching the source code for information like specific method calls or write accesses to certain fields. This kind of information is required to correctly implement new features and…
Scientific software projects evolve rapidly in their initial development phase, yet at the end of a funding period, the completion of a research project, thesis, or publication, further engagement in the project may slow down or cease…
One in five arXiv articles published in 2021 contained a URI to a Git Hosting Platform (GHP), which demonstrates the growing prevalence of GHP URIs in scholarly publications. However, GHP URIs are vulnerable to the same reference rot that…