I don’t know if you’ve heard of Zenodo. Among other things it allows to associate new releases of librairies such as Orekit and Hipparchus to DOI numbers. I know for a fact that you can link a GitHub repo to it, not sure about gitlab. Anyway it is very convenient for scientific authors who want to cite a particular version of a software they used in their research. It also gives credit to the contributors so it’s rewarding for the community. ESA’s pykep uses it for example.
What are your thoughts about using it for Orekit, Hipparchus, etc.
That’s a very good idea!
Sometimes we read paper talking about Orekit but we don’t know what version they are using. It could be very interesting to help knowing it.
After some quick reading it looks that unlike GitHub, gitlab is not linkable with zenodo yet. So only repo like Hipparchus would be automatically creating DOIs with new releases. I don’t think it’s retroactive either, so there’s gonna be a need for manual work for older versions and Orekit. Unfortunately I’m not familiar with that process, but there seems to be a dedicated API, with file upload. And entries can be created in advance, before the actual official publication. Anyway someone from the dev team is gonna have to create some sort of Zenodo account for Orekit.
Does the release manager have to do something particular during the release to include the Zenodo entry of can somebody else do it just after the release?
Somebody at CS needs to create a Zenodo account and link it to GitHub. Then, activate automatic Zenodo updates on the Orekit repo. This will trigger a new entry at the next release.
I have published version 2.3 of Hipparchus, after having linked a zenodo account to the github repository.
For now (about 20 minutes later), I don’t have any information if the process is working or not.
Awesome!
I’m pretty sure you can put this banner in the readme.
Hipparchus’ zenodo page already has a “how to cite” section but on the GitHub side you could also add a CITATION file.
Always thought the egg came first but that doesn’t help here
Maybe we could use the “cite all version” badge in the readme ?
I did it here and it points to the latest version.
However I reckon that someone wanting to get the DOI for a specific X.Y release in the “release-X.Y” branch will always get the DOI for the latest release.
I added the “cite all versions” badge to Orekit Gitlab home page and in the README file too:
What do you think ? Should we put it somewhere else ?
Maybe we could add a “Citing” section to the readme to clarify usage of “all versions” or “specific version” DOIs.
I think the “standard” way for github is to have a CITATION file providing with instructions on how to cite. Now, as for the DOI we want to put there, I don’t have a definite answer, it’s arbitrary I guess. In my opinion the most important thing is to have that holy DOI (whichever it is) allowing people to easily reference their use of Orekit.
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