Automation for citing Coq-community projects in publications

[palmskog]

Meta-issue

As highlighted for Coq in this issue, the possibility of conveniently citing projects in academic publications is important for many community participants, and can lead to higher visibility and more funding in the future.

The typical way of making an open source software project citeable is to put a release on Zenodo, e.g., Coq 8.9.0 and Equations 1.0. This generates a DOI and convenient citation metadata (e.g., BiBTeX).

If we could automate putting Coq-community releases on Zenodo, I think this would be a good idea. It would also mean one more preservation archive besides GitHub.

[Zimmi48]

That's a very good idea. It shouldn't be much more work to implement this automation for all coq-community packages beyond just for Coq, and it should even be useful for many more projects.

[Zimmi48]

Actually, I had almost forgotten that Zenodo already provides this kind of automation (as mentioned in the Coq issue): https://zenodo.org/account/settings/github/
I didn't find it sufficiently satisfying for Coq, but it should be for most projects, including for coq-community projects. We could start testing it on a sample of projects, and then document how to use it.

[palmskog]

GitHub has now added a way for flagging up citation options in the sidebar for a project. This sidebar can for example provide BiBTeX boilerplate. See more here: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1420122675813441540

The gist is that one needs to push a file called CITATION.cff containing the desired metadata. This file could for example be automatically pushed for a coq-community repo once a new release has been done and submitted to Zenodo.