We know that software is important in research, and some of us in the scholarly communications community, for example, in FORCE11, have been pushing the concept of software citation as a method to allow software developers and maintainers to get academic credit for their work: software releases are published and assigned DOIs, and software users then cite these releases when they publish research that uses the software.
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DOIs created for software is growing roughly exponentially, now reaching about 2000 software DOIs per month, with spikes of around 4000 per month in some of 2017. Software DOIs Registered at DataCite
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As of May 16, 2018, 58,301 DOIs have been registered for software. We can break down this number by repository where the software source code is hosted – most DOIs for software have been registered at Zenodo.
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We see a nice exponential growth in the number of DOIs for software, and we don’t expect this to change in 2018 and beyond.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
