Software deposit guidance for researchers

Research software is an integral part of the modern research ecosystem. Taken together, research software – alongside data, facilities, equipment, and an overarching research question – can be viewed as a research activity or experiment, worthy to be published. Conversely, a publication can be considered as a narrative that describes how the research objects are used together to reply to the research question.

Depositing research software into a digital repository can offer significant benefits. By depositing not just papers but also software and data sets, researchers can store a more complete record of this ecosystem for future use by both the original researchers and also the wider research community. Making research software available allows other researchers to inspect, replicate, reproduce and reuse the research as manifested in the software in the short term, and to inspect, for the historical record, in the long term. It allows research software to remain available beyond the lifetime of any current project, or a researcher's current employment at a specific institution. Digital repositories can also provide unique persistent digital identifiers for software which can be cited and so help researchers to get attribution and credit for their research software when it is used by others.

The guides

The Software Sustainability Institute guides cover the main aspects of software deposit including:

• Why software should be deposited

• When to deposit software

• Where to deposit it

• How to make a deposit

• What to deposit (and what not to deposit!)

• How to describe a deposit (metadata)

• How to choose a software licence

• How to review a software deposit. 

Please visit Software Deposit Guidance for Researchers to access both online versions of the guides and PDFs deposited in Zenodo.