New PeerJ Computer Science Special Issue - "Software Citation, Indexing, and Discoverability".

Edited by Daniel S. Katz (Chief Scientist, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Neil P. Chue Hong (Director, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh).

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Software is increasingly essential to research. It can be viewed as both a tool to be recorded (for reproducibility) and cited (for credit) as a part of scholarly research works, as well as an output of research that can be used, reused, and further developed. Making this happen effectively leads to challenges in how it is cited, indexed, and discovered. These include challenges relating to: software metadata; identifiers for software and their relationship to those of other research objects; the role of other stakeholders such as indexes, libraries and registries; fostering adoption; development of related tools; and the role of the FAIR principles in this space. This special issue will focus on recent work addressing these challenges.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Recording and translating between metadata schemas for software
The generation and curation of metadata for software used in research
Understanding the role of and interplay between types of software identifiers
Defining and analyzing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for research software
The role of scholarly (data) libraries in software, and their best practices
Uptake of software citation and obstacles
Techniques and datasets for identifying citations and references to research software
Challenges to including software in scholarly indices (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, Microsoft Academic Graph) and surfacing software in research discover and recommendation platforms (e.g., CZI Meta, Faculty Opinions), and potential solutions
The role of software in scholarly information systems (e.g., Crossref, Datacite, Scholix, PID Graph)
Tools and approaches to improve software discoverability (e.g., catalogs, registries, search engines)

Find out more and submit your abstract for consideration on the Special Issue homepage: https://peerj.com/special-issues/84-software