Scientists rarely cite research software they use as part of a research project. As a consequence, the software and the time spent developing and maintaining it becomes an invisible scholarly contribution. Furthermore, this lack of visibility means that incentives to produce high quality, sustainable software are missing. Among many reasons why software is not cited, one is the lack of a clear citation information from package developers.

At rOpenSci, our R package peer review process relies on the the hard work of many volunteer reviewers. These community members donate their time and expertise to improving the quality of rOpenSci packages and helping drive best practices into scientific software. Our open review process, where reviews and reviewers are public, means that one benefit for reviewers is that they can get credit for their reviews.

Scholarly metadata - the meta-information surrounding articles - can be super useful. Although metadata does not contain the full content of articles, it contains a lot of useful information, including title, authors, abstract, URL to the article, etc. One of the largest sources of metadata is provided via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting or OAI-PMH.