Making your project citable — GitHub without the command line documentation (original) (raw)

Discussion: is depositing your data/code on GitHub enough?

Consider the aspect of findability 5 or 10 years from now.
What could go wrong?

There are many services where you can share or archive your code and data: See for instance ourlesson on reproducible research.

In this present lesson we will discuss one of the many options to get a **digital object identifier (DOI)**for your dataset or code:Zenodo, A general-purpose open access repository created by OpenAIRE and CERN.Zenodo has nice integration with GitHub, and allows researchers to upload files up to 50 GB.

We will exercise in the Zenodo sandbox

We will practice on https://sandbox.zenodo.org/and not on the “real” https://zenodo.org/to make sure we do not create “real” DOIs which we cannot remove.

The sandbox service is useful to calibrate your setup until you are happy with the result and then you can go for the real service. Once a dataset is uploaded to the “real” service, it cannot be easily removed or modified again (and this is good, otherwise DOIs would not make much sense).

Step 1: Prepare an example repository

Through web:

Create a new repository on GitHub
Upload some example data into it

Or using GitHub Desktop:

Create a new repository
Commit some example data
Publish your example repository to GitHub

Alternatively we can also practice this with one of the repositories we created earlier in this lesson.

Here I just created a new one:

../_images/example-repo.png

Step 2: Activate the repository on Zenodo (sandbox)

Visit https://sandbox.zenodo.org/account/settings/github/:

../_images/zenodo.png

Select the repository you wish to preserve:

../_images/switch.png

If it is not there, you may need to “Sync now …”:

../_images/sync-now.png

Step 3: Create a “release” and get a DOI

Go back to the webpage of your GitHub repository
Click on “releases”:

../_images/releases.png

Fill out the form and click on “Publish release”:

../_images/publish-release.png

Finally reload https://sandbox.zenodo.org/account/settings/github/
It can take few moments for the project to be deposited
After a while it turns to this:

../_images/zenodo-published.png

Step 4: Add a DOI badge to your repository

This is bonus but for visitors of your GiHub repository it can be nice to find a badge in your README that informs them about and links to the preserved dataset/code on Zenodo.

On Zenodo, click on the badge (last figure) which opens up:

Try to add such a badge to your README for the exercise repository: