NSF Workshop on Supporting Scientific Discovery through Norms and Practices for Software and Data Citation and Attribution

Software is as essential as data in the modern practice of science. When scientists share with each other not only research results, but also data and software, it vastly amplifies the reach, relevance, and transparency of science. Yet there are substantial social, systemic, and technological barriers that prevent scientists from sharing data and software. Scientific researchers --- particularly academics --- are embedded in a reputation economy in which tenure, promotion, and acclaim are achieved through influential research results. Tenure and promotion decisions are typically blind to a researcher's contributions to shared data or software, despite the crucial role of these activities in the scientific endeavor. Compounding the problem, there are no standard practices for citing data and software, giving appropriate credit to contributors, or measuring the impact and value of data and software contributions. Although numerous data and software sharing repositories exist, each uses a slightly different approach and many scientists still distrust the public access model, preferring to share data and software only by personal request, which assures attribution through personal contact and implicit social contract but substantially limits the reach and benefit of shared data and software.