eLife archives research software in Software Heritage

Supporting Open Science and reproducibility of research is part of our mission, and we are excited to announce that the journal eLife has decided to systematically save source code repositories in the Software Heritage archive containing all software artifacts associated with the published article.

eLife is an open-access journal aiming to publish work of the highest standards and importance in all areas of biology and medicine, while exploring creative new ways to improve how research is assessed and published. eLife requires authors to fully describe the tool or resource in their article so that prospective users have all the information needed to deploy it within their own work. Any software created for eLife articles which is hosted by a provider using Git, Mercurial, or Subversion version control systems will now be safely archived in the Software Heritage Archive.

By saving code repositories in the Software Heritage archive, eLife ensures the long term preservation of these precious artifacts and offers its authors the possibility of referencing code fragments in their articles, using the Software Heritage identifiers (SWHID), that are intrinsic, persistent and decentralised.

We look forward to see many other follow this example!

If you are interested, just contact us!