GitHub is being used today to build scientific software that's helping find Earth-like planets in other solar systems, analyze DNA, and build open source rockets.
Seeing these projects and all this momentum within academia has pushed us to think about how we can make GitHub a better tool for research. As scientific experiments become more complex and their datasets grow, researchers are spending more of their time writing tools and software to analyze the data they collect. Right now though, these efforts often happen in isolation.
Citable code for academic software
Sharing your work is good, but collaborating while also getting required academic credit is even better. Over the past couple of months we've been working with the Mozilla Science Lab and data archivers, Figshare and Zenodo, to make it possible to get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for any GitHub repository archive.
DOIs form the backbone of the academic reference and metrics system. With a DOI for your GitHub repository archive, your code becomes citable. Our newest Guide explains how to create a DOI for your repository.
Read more: https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science
https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science
