Update acknowledgment instructions to reflect emerging software citation best practices

An emerging best practice for software citation is to cite the specific version of a software package, rather than only citing a journal article, website, or a continually changing code repository. For example, if I wanted to cite Astropy version 3.1, then I would cite the Astropy 3.1 Zenodo record and include the DOI of 10.5281/zenodo.4080996 to provide a persistent identifier that uniquely identifies which version of the software was used for a project.

I propose that we update the citation instructions to reflect this emerging best practice by requesting that authors cite (1) the Zenodo record for the relevant Astropy release, and (2) the 2013 & 2018 papers. The information on the \software macro for AASTeX and the sentence in the acknowledgments would need to be updated to include both the software & journal citations but otherwise wouldn’t need to change. (This could also involve updating astropy.__citation__ to be the Zenodo record, though this would require reserving the DOI for the next Astropy version ahead of time and updating it there ahead of the release…which is something that could easily be forgotten. I’m not sure what’s best here.)

For more information on this I’d suggest the article

• D. Bouquin et al. (2020, ApJ), Credit Lost: Two Decades of Software Citation in Astronomy
• Interview with Daina Bouquin about this paper
• AAS Journals Policy Statement on Software

We updated the software citation policy for PlasmaPy in response to the Bouquin et al. paper. That paper also talks about the serious disadvantages of using a journal article citation as the proxy for a software citation (e.g., people who contributed to the package after then aren’t listed as authors, ambiguity about which version of the software was actually used which reduces reproducibility, and papers becoming out-of-date compared to more recent versions of the software).

[pllim]

cc @adrn @jdswinbank @eteq

Thanks! I milestoned this to 4.3 because I think this is important to be sorted out before the next major release.

[DougBurke]

It’s at this point that I bring in @augustfly to the discussion as he has worked on this/been brought into this because of me for other projects.

Zenodo explicitly has different DOIs for each release, and there is a “general” DOI for the project but I don’t know what the latest information is on attempts to identify the latest version. I believe that Zenodo lets you pre-register a DOI for a release, which might be useful for a “create the docs” system but I don’t know if you can actually do anything with that DOI until there’s been a release. https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta/issues/167 has some related - but not directly relevant - discussions.