Or store the containers in the Internet Archive alongside the paper. They’re just tarballs. Lots of options as long as you're comfortable with object storage.
This still means that tools published in the last few years until now might just be gone soon. The people who uploaded the images might have graduated or moved on and none will be there to save the work.
Yep, just mentioned it to the Archive Team IRC. We're probably going to selectively archive particular Docker images, although that's a lot of manual labor.
If you have any ideas wrt to selecting important images, that'd be great.
Yeah, good idea — I’m not in these fields so it’s difficult for me to judge. Also, it sounds like we should be prioritizing niche images that only a handful of papers use rather than images that people rely upon regularly.
Since images tend to be based on each other I wonder if someone's analyzed the corresponding dependency graph yet. In theory you should get quite far if you isolate the most commonly used base images.
Publishing containers to GitHub might be free but you have to login to GitHub to download the containers from free accounts, significantly hampering end-user usability compared to Docker Hub, particularly if 2FA authentication is enabled on a GitHub account. As mentioned elsewhere Quay.io might be another alternative.
...but not to download. You can clone a repo and download release artifacts without a PAT. That's only necessary for interacting with the API for actions that need authentication, which would be anything involving mutating a repository.
GitHub access tokens are a bit of a nightmare since you can't limit the permissions for a token. Only workaround I've found is to create another GitHub user for an access token and restrict that user's access.