SoftWare Hash IDentifier (SWHID) and use cases

Preserving and referencing software is essential for transparency, reproducibility, and credit in Academia. The SoftWare Hash IDentifier (SWHID), developed by Software Heritage and standardized as ISO/IEC 18670:2025, provides intrinsic, decentralized and cryptographically strong identifiers for source code artifacts.

Unlike extrinsic identifiers such as DOIs, SWHIDs are computed directly from the software content, enabling verifiability, decentralization, and long-term accessibility. They are already adopted in scholarly infrastructures like HAL, Zenodo, IPOL, eLife, Episciences, Dagstuhl, swMath and OpenAIRE.

This presentation introduces the SWHIDs, and explores their role in citation, archival, and reuse of software.