Depsy: impact of research code

[Zakariyya Mughal]

Hello everyone and happy new year!

I came across this article in Nature which describes how the people
behind Depsy are working on tracking research code and giving
attribution to the research computing that goes into scientific
literature:

- "The unsung heroes of scientific software" <http://www.nature.com/news/the-unsung-heroes-of-scientific-software-1.19100>

Right now Depsy <http://depsy.org/> only tracks CRAN (for R) and PyPI
(for Python). Perhaps they could use some help with doing the same for
CPAN? I've added an issue to bring this up at <https://github.com/Impactstory/depsy/issues/34>.

I think this tool does not look at GitHub itself which might not work
out well for researchers that are not uploading their code to one of
those archives (for example, some of my code is mostly C, not Perl)

There is an issue in the tracker which suggest using the Debian package
repository as a data source, so that can be a place to start
<https://github.com/Impactstory/depsy/issues/29>.

Cheers,
- Zakariyya Mughal