Asclepias - Capturing Software Citations In Astronomy

Abstract

Long abstract for talk given at Metrics workshop at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Abstract: There is general agreement that curating and preserving software products, and making them citable, are worthwhile efforts, as is linking software products with publications, in order to capture the full life cycle and to improve discoverability. This is definitely true in the physical sciences. However, there is currently no established standard or policy for citing software in scholarly publications. There are several reasons behind the current impasse: the lack of clear editorial standards and expectations on the part of the journal publishers; the difficulty in fitting software products in a model constructed for citing publications; the need to ensure a unique, persistent identifier to the software product used in the paper; and an antiquated view of the software as having a narrow scholarly impact on the paper itself. A proper solution will address all of these reasons. Even without an established way to cite software products, there is mounting evidence that a significant number of scientists want to acknowledge the contribution of software in their scholarly articles. This acknowledgment has taken one of two forms: via citations to a “software paper” or by mentioning a software product in the text of the article. Here we present an ongoing project called "Asclepias", a collaboration between the American Astronomical Society (AAS), Zenodo and the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The goal of this project is to promote scientific software into an identifiable, citable, and preservable object. It is focusing upon the needs of two of the most important roles researchers play in the scholarly ecosystem: authors of scholarly manuscripts and developers of scientific software. Currently a technical framework is being built and work is done in promoting a set of social practices that will “fix” the problems associated with software citations.