A half-day Carpentries Incubator lesson on making research software citable, discoverable, and reusable. Learners work entirely in the browser: they fork a small demo repository and add an open-source license, a CITATION.cff file, a versioned release with a Zenodo DOI, and richer metadata for discovery.
Rendered lesson: https://ucospo.net/research-software-citable-discoverable/ — start here to read, teach, or preview the lesson. Learner setup, learning objectives, prerequisites, and the full episode sequence all live on the lesson site.
Audience: library, OSPO, and scholarly-communications staff who support research software, plus researchers who write code and want to make it citable. Each episode includes a "Supporting others" thread for the consulting side of that work.
Status: Alpha, under active development. Feedback and contributions are welcome.
We especially welcome:
- Feedback from library, OSPO, and Carpentries instructors and learners
- Episode-level issues: content gaps, exercises that don't work, timing problems
- Suggestions that make the lesson more useful to library and information-science audiences
Please open an issue or a pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for our community expectations.
The hands-on exercises use a purpose-built demo repository, UC-OSPO-Network/software-demo, which learners fork into their own account. It carries view-only reference branches (after-license, after-citation, after-release, after-metadata, and optional-pixi) that show the target state after each episode, so learners can check their work.
To cite this lesson, see CITATION.cff or use GitHub's "Cite this repository" button. The lesson is derived from the Building Better Research Software curriculum; a full citation for the original appears on the lesson's Cite page.
Content is licensed CC BY 4.0. Lesson infrastructure uses The Carpentries Workbench.
Developed under the UC OSPO Network. The lesson draws on:
- FAIR4RS Principles (RDA/FORCE11/ReSA)
- Software Citation Principles (Smith et al. 2016)
- CODE Beyond FAIR (Di Cosmo et al. 2026)