Software Heritage

Software Heritage’s - https://www.softwareheritage.org/ - goal is to collect, preserve and share the source code providing access to as many users (students, developers and scientists) as possible.

Software Heritage provides a Persistent Identifier (PID) that can identify each and every source code artifact with integrity, called a SWHID. See here for more information about the identifiers in SWH: https://www.softwareheritage.org/2020/07/09/intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-identifiers/ and https://docs.softwareheritage.org/devel/swh-model/persistent-identifiers.html.1

A number of software platforms are already crawled by Software Heritage, so it is highly possible that your code is already archived by SWH! You can discover if it is the case by browsing the Software Heritage archive portal:

If your code (or the latest version of it) is not yet in the archive, you need first to trigger its archival. See FAQ 3.5 for the use of the “Save code now” request: https://www.softwareheritage.org/faq/#35_I_want_the_full_SWHID_for_a_source_code_that_is_not_already_in_the_archive_How_can_I_proceed_How_long_will_it_take

SWH is a data source of OpenAire, so most of the SWH objects are also included in the OpenAire Graph. Furthermore, since Nov. 2024, Software Heritage and Zenodo are also closely connected enabling code deposited to Zenodo to be automatically archived in Software Heritage (see: https://www.softwareheritage.org/2024/11/13/software-heritage-zenodo-integration/).

  1. Software metadata good practices: https://codemeta.github.io/ (accessed July 2024) ↩

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