Dario Grana, Derek Karssenberg, Pauline Collon and Leandro de Figueiredo
Modern code distribution and sharing is no longer through static uploading to a single website, as has beein done in the past (http://www.iamg.org/). In the spirit of being a modern computer science journal we will publish all code on github. GitHub is a free web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub is the most popular of such sites and as long as the code remains public is completely free of charge. Any code submitted to Computers & Geosciences should be freely uploaded, we do not publish commercial or advertise any for-pay code. Readers can now easily find and download your code; authors can upload modifications to the code on their own GitHub page. In this short manual, we will go through the simple steps needed to have your code uploaded. You can decide for yourself to either limit yourself to this procedure or make full use of the github capabilities for you or your research group.
The procedure is as follows:
- Authors need to create an account on github and upload their code in a repository.
- Authors should add at least a README.md file with the title of your paper, co-authors, description of the code/data and other information useful to those who may be interested to use it.
- Once your code is on your personal github site, send the URL of this repository to the editor
- The Editor will then fork that repository under CAGEO, the Computers & Geosciences site under GitHub so that everyone can easily find it.
- Authors may request updates to be uploaded to their CAGEO repository should major updates or bug fixes of the code/data become available in the future.
Note that ideally, the github repository should match the material of the paper, and that the fork will always point to the original, author's repository that was forked. It is expected that users will use the CAGEO site to discover the location of the author's original repository, where they can learn about potential developments of the software beyond those described in the paper.
An introduction to using github is found here; there's no need for branches, merges, or pull requests in the procedure as used here.