Daniel S. Katz and Hollydawn Murray, supported by more than 15 publishers, write a guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen, “Citing Software in Scholarly Publishing to Improve Reproducibility, Reuse and Credit.” They make a case for authors and publishers to publish and cite software code itself, rather than merely an article about the code or research that was generated using code. Properly cited, open software enables others to reproduce research and modify and reuse that code for further developments. Those who write the code deserve credit for this critical work and they can’t receive it if their software isn’t properly cited. The FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group has proposed a set of customizable guidelines to clearly identify the software and credit its developers and maintainers.
