Research relies heavily on scientific software, and a large and growing fraction of researchers are engaged in developing software as part of their own research (Hannay et al 2009). Despite this, infrastructure to support the preservation, discovery, reuse, and attribution of software lags substantially behind that of other research products such as journal articles and research data. This lag is driven not so much by a lack of technology as it is by a lack of unity: existing mechanisms to archive, document, index, share, discover, and cite software contributions are heterogeneous among both disciplines and archives and rarely meet best practices (Howison 2015). Fortunately, a rapidly growing movement to improve preservation, discovery, reuse and attribution of academic software is now underway: a recent NIH report, conferences and working groups of FORCE11, WSSSPE & Software Sustainability Institute, and the rising adoption of repositories like GitHub, Zenodo, figshare & DataONE by academic software developers. Now is the time to improve how these resources can talk to each other.
