Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher who authored a Python package, released it under MIT with a Zenodo DOI, and maintains it with a CITATION.cff file
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A one-off analysis script emailed to a colleague is not open-software contribution in the citable sense
Editorial commentary
Open-software contribution is the development, documentation, packaging, testing, or maintenance of research software released under an open-source licence — authoring new code, contributing to an existing project, releasing a reusable library, or taking on long-term maintenance. Credit is increasingly formalised through software citation with a DOI (via Zenodo or Software Heritage), CRediT’s Software role, and Research Software Engineer (RSE) career frameworks that treat sustained software work as a legitimate research career track in its own right.
How it differs from related terms: Open-data contribution is the same category of preparatory, often-invisible labour applied to datasets rather than code. Credit can attach at different granularities — a citation to a software release as a whole, or a per-contributor list in a machine-readable CITATION.cff file naming individual commits or maintenance roles — and the two are not interchangeable for attribution purposes.
A one-off analysis script emailed to a colleague, with no release, licence, or version history, is not open-software contribution in the citable sense; publication, licensing, and a persistent identifier are what convert code into a creditable output.
References
- Smith et al., “Software Citation Principles,” PeerJ Computer Science (2016)
- FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group (2020)
Also known as
Research software contribution · RSE contribution
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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