Open-Software Contribution Credit

Open-software contribution

The development, documentation, packaging, testing, or maintenance of research software released under an open-source licence, including authoring new code, contributing to existing projects, releasing reusable libraries, or operating long-term maintenance.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 5 Sept 2026

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Open-software contribution is the development, documentation, packaging, testing, or maintenance of research software released under an open-source licence — authoring new code, contributing to an existing project, releasing a reusable library, or taking on long-term maintenance. Credit is increasingly formalised through software citation with a DOI (via Zenodo or Software Heritage), CRediT’s Software role, and Research Software Engineer (RSE) career frameworks that treat sustained software work as a legitimate research career track in its own right.

How it differs from related terms: Open-data contribution is the same category of preparatory, often-invisible labour applied to datasets rather than code. Credit can attach at different granularities — a citation to a software release as a whole, or a per-contributor list in a machine-readable CITATION.cff file naming individual commits or maintenance roles — and the two are not interchangeable for attribution purposes.

A one-off analysis script emailed to a colleague, with no release, licence, or version history, is not open-software contribution in the citable sense; publication, licensing, and a persistent identifier are what convert code into a creditable output.

References

Smith et al., “Software Citation Principles,” PeerJ Computer Science (2016)
FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group (2020)

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Open-software contribution"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-software-contribution" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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