Software Citation Implementation Challenges

Understand

The main output of the FORCE11 Software Citation working group (https://www.force11.org/group/software-citation-working-group) was a paper on software citation principles (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86) published in September 2016.

• This paper laid out a set of six high-level principles for software citation (importance, credit and attribution, unique identification, persistence, accessibility, and specificity) and discussed how they could be used to implement software citation in the scholarly community.
• In a series of talks and other activities, we have promoted software citation using these increasingly accepted principles.
• At the time the initial paper was published, we also provided guidance and examples on how to make software citable, though we now realize there are unresolved problems with that guidance.