Publishing on The Carpentries

Introducing Cite This Lesson Pages to The Carpentries Workbench

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new version of The Carpentries Workbench was released this month, and included several exciting new features.

Cite This Lesson Pages

Cite This Lesson pages will now be included in any lesson with a CITATION.cff file in the source repository. By displaying contributor information as a part of the lesson website, these pages will provide a lot more visibility to all the people who have made the lesson what it is. The Curriculum Team has been hoping to provide this kind of acknowledgement to lesson contributors for many years, and this is a major step towards the establishment of a regular release cycle for Carpentries lessons.

Citation Information for Open Source Lessons

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, co-authored by members of the CodeRefinery project and The Carpentries Curriculum Team, we discuss the current state and potential future applications of the Citation File Format (CFF) for open source lesson projects. The post concludes with a set of recommendations for what information should be captured in a CITATION.cff and how.

What is the Citation File Format (CFF)?

The Citation File Format is a plain-text human- and machine readable citation information metadata for software and datasets. The text files contain standardized fields and use the YAML serialization language. These fields are listed in a CITATION.cff text file, including but not limited to authors, title, version, identifiers, and type. Type is currently restricted to software and dataset. While lessons are neither software nor a dataset, the metadata collected in the CFF file represents well everything needed in order to also cite lesson materials.

Citation Format

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Earlier this month, we published our lessons by giving them DOIs through Zenodo. As we said in an earlier post, though, we've been struggling to figure out (a) how to cite them in text and (b) how to express their metadata in standard bibliographic formats to produce those human-readable citations.

Our Lessons Have Now Been Published

Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally published Version 5.3 of our core lessons. Please cite them as:

What Is ORCID?

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Part of being a successful researcher lies in the ability to stand out from your peers, which can be done through making and being acknowledge for valuable and original contributions. Once acknowledged for one discovery this can then act as a springboard to allow your peers to identify your other scholarly contributions, or alternatively identify potential for future collaboration, or be used as a proof of your research skills when applying for further funding. In short, making your work and accomplishments known is crucial to success in academia.

Yet whilst so many functions of the academic process hang on the concept of citations and as such the ability to identify the researchers behind a piece of work, the actual means of identifying a researcher is not without its problems. For example how to identify the discoveries and related work of a specific "John Smith" after coming across one of the author's particularly informative publications? How do we keep up to date with a researcher's publications if they change their name? How do we keep track of a successful researcher who works across a number of institutions over the course of their career or who engages in work across a range of disciplines?

Publishing, Metadata, and Being Ahead of the Curve

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As described in earlier posts, we are publishing our Version 5.3 lessons through Zenodo to make it easier for people to cite them. We're getting closer, but there are still a few bumps in front of us, and we would like our readers to help us figure out what to do next.

An Update on Publishing Our Lessons

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Just a quick update on publishing our lessons: we prepared the release on schedule, uploaded it to Zenodo, and then discovered that we couldn't actually specify editors through their web interface, only authors, even though "editor" is an allowed value in the metadata. We also couldn't specify "lesson" as a type: our choices were "publication" (which is pretty generic) or "presentation" (which isn't quite right). Figshare and COS wouldn't let us do this either, but Zenodo is now working on it. They hope to release it by the end of June, at which point we'll wrap this up.

Publishing Our Lessons

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are one of the building blocks of academic bibliography systems. It's now possible to get a DOI for a GitHub repository (or more accurately, for the state of a GitHub repository at a particular point in time). We are going to use this to publish a citable version of our core lessons.

Publishing on the Web

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Back in December, I asked a question on the Software Carpentry issue track: What should we teach about writing/publishing papers in a webby world? It led to a lively discussion about how the web is changing scientific publishing, the tools people can use to take advantage of those changes, and the gap between what's possible and what publishers (and senior academics) will actually accept. Many commenters dove immediately into the details of specific tools, but Justin Kitzes nailed it when he said: