A statement in a published article describing where the source code used in the study can be obtained, under what licence, and at what version, typically required by journal policy.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
'Analysis code is available at github.com/lab/study (commit a1b2c3) and archived at Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.XXXXXXX, MIT licence.'
Is an instance
A statement linking to a Snakemake pipeline release tag.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A statement 'code available on reasonable request' with no archive link.
Not an instance
Pseudocode in the methods section without an executable counterpart.

Editorial commentary

Best-practice code availability statements link to both a working repository (GitHub) and a permanent archive (Zenodo, Software Heritage) with a version tag or commit hash, and a licence. They complement the data availability statement and are increasingly subject to verification rather than self-attestation.

References

Nature 'Code and software submissions' policy.

Also known as

software availability statement

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Code availability statement"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/code-availability-statement" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/code-availability-statement",
  "name": "Code availability statement",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/code-availability-statement",
  "description": "A statement in a published article describing where the source code used in the study can be obtained, under what licence, and at what version, typically required by journal policy.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/code-availability-statement",
  "sameAs": [
    "software availability statement"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:49",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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