Audience

This guide is for software developers who would like to register their software in the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph (KG).

Introduction

Most software changes over time, with new features or bug fixes, and new releases. For scientific research to be reproducible, it is important to keep track of which versions of software were used for a given study. This means it needs to be easy for the developers of software used in the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure to keep the information about their software up-to-date, and to register new versions of their software when they are released.

For this reason, the process of adding information about software and software versions has been automated as much as possible. Two methods are available:

1. providing a codemeta.json file in your software repository.
2. publishing software through Zenodo.

Method 1: Providing a codemeta.json file in your software repository

CodeMeta is a project developed by a number of actors involved in sharing software, including Zenodo, GitHub, DataCite and Software Heritage, to provide a common specification for software metadata. EBRAINS has adopted the CodeMeta specification to maximise interoperability with other software repositories, and to minimise the added burden on software developers. A web form for generating codemeta.json files is available at https://codemeta.github.io/codemeta-generator/, provided by Software Heritage.

To register your software with EBRAINS, place a codemeta.json file in your code repository (e.g. on GitHub or GitLab), and send the URL of the file to the curation team via EBRAINS support. Your software will then automatically be registered in the KG.

Whenever you make a new release of the software, update the codemeta.json file. EBRAINS will scan this file regularly and whenever it finds a new version identifier the new version will be added to the KG, and linked to all the previous versions.

Method 2: Publishing software through Zenodo

If you already share your software through Zenodo, you can register it with EBRAINS as well by sending the Zenodo URL to the curation team via EBRAINS support. Whenever a new version of your software is published through Zenodo, it will also be automatically added to the KG.