Published July 4, 2023 | Version v1
Presentation Open

Archiving Source Code in Software Heritage

  • 1. INRIA

Description

Software Heritage, the universal source code archive, has the ambitious goal to collect, preserve and share all publicly available software in source code form. Recognizing that source code embodies our technical and scientific knowledge, it is crucial to archive, reference describe and cite software the same way we do with publications and data. In the EU project FAIRCORE4EOSC, a dedicated team is missioned with the task to identify and archive the relevant software for academia in general and for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), in particular. The EOSC-Core components are included as a primary aim to be saved for the long term in the universal source code archive, Software Heritage.  It is important to note that archiving any software repository is extremely easy with the save code now feature, where anyone can save any code (like archive.org's Wayback machine). Though saving is easy, finding is hard. This is why preparing the code for archival with machine-actionable metadata can ensure the Research Software and the EOSC-Core components are findable. 

In this FAIRCORE4EOSC webinar on 7 July 2023, we introduced the Software Heritage archive features and presented guidelines to better archive code repositories, detailing the steps on how you can prepare the service repositories so as to help us easily index them and archive them in Software Heritage. Make sure your source code is hosted on a repository publicly accessible (Github, Bitbucket, a GitLab instance, an institutional software forge, etc.) using one of the version control systems supported by Software Heritage, currently Git, Subversion and Mercurial. We presented a set of well-established best practices to make the repository indexable. A linked data metadata file will assist in indexing your source code in the Software Heritage archive and provide an easy way to link to other related research outputs. 

Watch the webinar recording

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2023-07-04-webinar-Archiving-software.pdf

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Additional details

Funding

FAIRCORE4EOSC – Core Components Supporting a FAIR EOSC 101057264
European Commission