Publish & share your code

Sharing and Citing Your Code

Sharing your code using open, collaborative platforms is essential to open science because it encourages collaboration and reuse, enables citability, and adds transparency needed for reproducibility.

Version control and online collaboration

There are many ways to share your code. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab are often used because they support both version control of your project and simplify online collaboration. By placing your code on these platforms, you can receive feedback and improve your projects through collective input, while also tracking changes that happen to the code over time.

Make your code citable

Citing your code is also important to support getting credit for the work you (and your collaborators) did to write it! There are many ways to make your code citable.

1. Publish a paper: You could write a paper about your software and publish it in a journal. If you wish to publish your code only, journals like the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) combined with peer-review processes like pyOpenSci provide valuable support.

2. Use a platform like Zenodo If you don’t want to publish formally but still want your code to be citable, you can use tools like Zenodo. Zenodo allows you to give proper credit to contributors and add credibility to your work without going through a formal publication process. Citing code encourages transparency and reproducibility, making it easier for others to build upon your efforts.