ConservationBytes.com

These days with data and code often required to be designated as open-source, licenced, and fully trackable for most manuscript submissions to a peer-reviewed journal, it’s easy to get lost in the multitude of platforms and options available. In most cases, we no longer have much of a choice to do so, even if you are reticent (although the benefits of posting your data and code online immediately far outweigh any potential disadvantages).

But do you post your data and code on the Open Science Framework (free), Github (free), Figshare (free), Zenodo (free, but donations encouraged), Dryad ($), or Harvard Dataverse (free) (and so on, and so on, …)? Pick your favourite. Another issue that arises is that even if you have solved the first dilemma, how do you obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) for your data and/or code?

Again, there are many ways to do this, and some methods are more automated than other. That said, I do have a preference that is rather easy to implement that I’d thought I’d share with you here.

The first requirement is getting yourself a (free) Github account. What’s Github? Github is one of the world’s largest communities of developers, where code for all manner of types and uses can be developed, shared, updated, collaborated, shipped, and maintained. It might seem a bit overwhelming for non-developers, but if you strip it down to its basics, it’s straightforward to use as a simple repository for your code and data. Of course, Github is designed for so much more than just this (software development collaboration being one of the main ones), but you don’t need to worry about that for now.

Step 1

Once you create an account, you can start creating ‘repositories’, which are essentially just sections of your account dedicated to specific code (and data). I mostly code in R, so I upload my R code text files and associated datasets to these repositories, and spend a good deal of effort on making the Readme.md file highly explanatory and easy to follow. You can check out some of mine here.

Ok. So, you have a repository with some code and data, you’ve explained what’s going on and how the code works in the Readme file, and now you want a permanent DOI that will point to the repository (and any updates) for all time.

Github doesn’t do this by itself, but it integrates seamlessly with another platform — Zenodo — that does. Oh no! Not another platform! Yes, I’m afraid so, but it’s not as painful as you might expect.