Automate production of CITATION.cff file

[sbliven]

The Citation File Format is a standard for improving citations of open source software. It got some prominent mentions at BOSC this year and seems to be building community support.

Basically, you add a CITATION.cff file to your repository, which is a YAML file with some metadata about how to cite the software. Citations typically use the Zenodo DOI so they are linked to a particular software version (e.g. BioJava 5.2.1).

The benefits of citing software seem pretty obvious to me (reproducability, attribution, etc) and the case for documenting this and making it machine readable is made here. I also see two arguments for not doing this (at least in CFF form):

1. It needs to be updated after each release. This could potentially be addressed as part of our release tools (e.g. using the zenodo API to generate a DOI before releasing).
2. It duplicates metadata currently stored in pom.xml. This could also be mitigated by fancy release scripts with enough effort.

Thoughts?

[josemduarte]

Thanks @sbliven . That's indeed a nice feature to have. However I have concerns about having a manually generated file that needs to be manually updated for every release.

One thing I don't understand is how is the Zenodo DOI generated? Did you create one yourself? Does it get created automatically with BioJava releases?

[sbliven]

@josemduarte There are actually two DOIs here: the version-independent DOI (10.5281/zenodo.2557852) and DOIs for each version (e.g. 10.5281/zenodo.2557853 for biojava-5.2.1). By default, the versioned DOIs get created automatically for github releases. However, there is also an API that allows them to be pre-reserved. I've been discussing this on gitter:OBF/BOSC_community and hoping that a tool would come out of last week's eLife Sprint, but I haven't heard any news yet. I'd say there's a good chance that generating the CFF can be automated as part of the release process, but it won't be ready for 5.3.0 (#848).

[sbliven]

In summary, we can choose to either add the manual CFF now and automate for the next release, or else delay merging #847 until the full procedure is in place.

[josemduarte]

Thanks @sbliven . The cff file in #847 only contains the version DOI and not the version-independent one. That's intended I guess?

[josemduarte]

In any case, let's merge for now and worry about automation later. I'll change the name of this issue to reflect that.