Asclepias: Software Citations Enter the Scholarly Literature World

Abstract

In September of 2016, the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) started to work on the implementation of first-class support of software. This work was started as a result of the Asclepias project, funded through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the American Astronomical Society. The main goal of the Asclepias project is to promote scientific software into an identifiable, citable, and preservable object. It highlighted the fact that no single stakeholder can solve the software citation problem. It requires close collaboration between a publisher (the American Astronomical Society), a repository (Zenodo) and an indexing service (ADS). This paper focuses on the contribution the ADS has made to this project. Five years later, the ADS has indexed just over 10k Zenodo software records, representing almost 19k citations. How did we get here? We describe the underlying infrastructure developed at ADS which implements a software citation detection, metadata capture and ingest, and event-driven notification system to a broker used by ADS collaborators. We include a discussion of the challenges that we have encountered in the implementation and operation of the system.