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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Enter Depsy [depsy.org], a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to “measure the value of software that powers science”.

Schliep’s [a post-doctoral researcher who has contributed to scientific software projects] profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact. “Depsy does a good job in finding all my software contributions,” says Schliep.

Depsy’s creators hope that their platform will provide a transparent and meaningful way to track the impact of software built by academics. The technology behind it was developed by Impactstory, a non-profit firm based in Vancouver, Canada, that was founded four years ago to help scientists to track the impact of their online output. That includes not just papers but also blog posts, data sets and software, and measuring impact by diverse metrics such as tweets, views, downloads and code reuse, as well as by conventional citations.

In effect, Depsy recognizes the “unsung heroes” of scientific software, says Jason Priem, co-founder of Impactstory, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation and various philanthropic foundations.

Is there something like Depsy for FOSS? If not, we could use one.

Original Submission