Related papers: Archiving and referencing source code with Softwar…
Software source code is an essential research output, and many research communities strongly encourage making the source code of the artefact available by archiving it in publicly-accessible long-term archives.Software Heritage is a non…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In this article, we present the challenge of software citation as a method to ensure credit for and identification, discovery, and reuse of software in scientific and engineering research. We discuss related work and key challenges/research…
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…
In Open Source Software, the source code and any other resources available in a project can be viewed or reused by anyone subject to often permissive licensing restrictions. In contrast to some studies of dependency-based reuse supported…
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 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…
Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…
Reading computer program code and documentation written by others is, we are told, one of the best ways to learn the art of writing intelligible and maintainable code and documentation. The software resurrection exercise, introduced in this…
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…