Obtaining a doi from Zenodo.org
You have a piece of code on github, but it is changing over time, and you would like to provide a link to a particular version of the code. This is important for reproducibility of your research work, both for yourself and others.
The Zenodo repository provides a safe, trusted, and citable place to host your code. Zenodo is primarily focused on the storage of data, but this includes: documentation, papers, posters, raw or processed data, source code, and compiled binaries. Zenodo will allow you to version your data but does not provide a version control system such as git. However, Zenodo and Github are friends so you can link them together to get the best of both worlds.
Sign up to Zenodo
You can create a new Zenodo account using an email address and password, or you can use your Github or ORCID accounts to login. Whatever you choose, you can still link your github/ORCID later and use them to sign in.
Create a new repository
Once signed in click on the upload button at the top of the page, and then on the next page click “New Upload”
The following page will have a lot of details, some of which are mandatory, but most of which are either recommended or optional. Begin by downloading a .zip of your files from Github, and then uploading it to Zenodo. Press the green “start upload” button and then start filling out the rest of the form.
As the upload is progressing you can fill in the upload type (Software) and basic information.
Leave the DOI blank, but click the “reserve DOI” button so that you can know what the final DOI will be.
Fill in the remainder of the form and then press “save” at the top of the page, this will make a draft of your repository that you can come back to later and update. When you are finally happy with all the details you can press ‘publish’.
Once your upload has been published you should navigate to the published repository in your uploads list, and select it.
The above example is for the Aegean source finding software that I developed. You can see the DOI badge with the full DOI, a link to supplementary material, and the licence. If you click the DOI badge you’ll get a new pane that shows you how to embed this information into a markdown file such as your README.md that you have on your github page!
Below this panel you can also see a box that allows people to cite your code. There is even a box that allows people to get the citation in any format that they need it.
You now have a version of your code which is archived on zenodo and will not change. If you want to update the archive with new versions of the code, Zenodo has the capacity to do this, and will mint a new doi for each version. It is recommended that you don’t make a new doi for every small change you make to your code. A new version for each major or minor version change would be appropriate, or when you have published work that used a particular major/minor/patch version of the code.
Sadly Zenodo is not indexed by ADS so you can’t track citations very well from here.