Software that has never been deposited

Most packages carry no DOI at all. Releasing to PyPI and tagging on GitHub mints none, and a library that has never been deposited with Zenodo or DataCite has nothing a https://doi.org/ link could resolve to. Such a work is cited by where it lives instead — a url in place of a doi — which is the shape a repository’s CITATION.cff file already takes, and which a site that keeps no such file states in documenteer.toml directly:

# documenteer.toml

[[project.citations]]
url = "https://github.com/lsst-sqre/safir"
label = "Software"
type = "software"
preferred = true
title = "Safir"
publisher = "NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory"
date = 2020
authors = [
    { name = "NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory", ror = "https://ror.org/048g3cy84" },
]

The entry is marked preferred, and a citation with no DOI always is: self is the claim that this site is a DOI’s registered landing page, so it needs a DOI to be the landing page of, while preferred only says which citation the site asks readers to use. Marking neither is what leaves a site with nothing on its surfaces — the footer shows no citation, and a card with no argument has none to render and warns (see Unresolvable citations) — so a package site’s single entry sets preferred.

Nothing else about the entry is special. The footer and a card render it the way they render a cited DOI, ending in a link to the repository rather than to doi.org, and it reaches the site-wide JSON-LD block in full as the work the site asks to be cited. The one surface it cannot reach is the inline doi role, whose link text is the DOI: an entry that has none is linked with ordinary hyperlink syntax instead. Nor does such a site carry the per-page citation meta tags, which describe a DOI’s landing page and are emitted only for a self entry; see Machine-readable metadata.

The entry states no version and is cited with one anyway. A software entry the site marks preferred is this site’s own package, so it takes the site’s project.version, and on a site published from its default branch — as safir.lsst.io is, from main — that is the development build the documentation was made from: Safir (version 15.2.2.dev4+g9c8d32d17). That is deliberate. These pages document that code and not the last tag, and naming the tag would credit a release the reader is not reading the documentation of.

A site that would rather cite releases has two ways to say so. Setting version on the entry pins it, and always wins over the default. Publishing the documentation from tags instead of from the default branch makes the version the site builds with a release, which leaves the entry stating nothing and citing 15.2.2 — and is the honest form of the request, since the published pages are then the release’s documentation.

A site whose repository keeps a CITATION.cff file does not restate any of this: cff takes the URL from the file’s url, or from its repository-code when the file names no landing page, along with the rest of the record. That is how this site cites Documenteer; see Citing software from CITATION.cff.