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appleseed, our open source (MIT) physically-based rendering software, is used in various circles, one of them being academia.

We have been asked to obtain a DOI so that our software could be cited. We're planning to publish our releases to Zenodo.

GitHub currently lists 69 contributors on our main repository. Should we consider all of them as authors of the software, or would it be more appropriate to somehow select a subset of the contributors?

If the latter, how should we define such a subset? We have all kinds of contributors: one-time contributors, occasional contributors, regular contributors, core contributors, project owners, Google Summer of Code students, mentors... Who should we include or exclude?

Edit 1: here is a paper that seems relevant:

Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. 2016. Software citation principles. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86

Edit 2: here is a tentative publication of our latest official release to Zenodo:
https://zenodo.org/record/3384658

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  • Are you planning on getting a DOI for every release? That's quite different from the usual approach I see for academic software, where one writes a paper announcing and describing the software, and only write a replacement paper in case of major updates.
    – Anyon
    Sep 3 '19 at 12:29
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    @Anyon The standard process at Zenodo with the Github integration is to get a DOI pointing to the entire project (always referencing the latest release), and additionally a DOI for every release. This allows both abstract references to the entire project, and precise references to specific software versions. guides.github.com/activities/citable-code
    – malexmave
    Sep 3 '19 at 13:01
  • @malexmave Interesting! Thanks for the information.
    – Anyon
    Sep 3 '19 at 15:29

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