[gjuggler]

This is a very cool technical integration between two services that are — or should be — used by most scientists working in code. But what exactly is the "problem" of citation of code that this solution fixes?

Let's say you release your project to GitHub & figshare and now have a DOI in hand. What are you supposed to do with it? Do you ask your users to cite this DOI if they use your software? If so, what text should accompany the citation? How do you track citations to your code? Will they show up in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science?

And what if the journal one of your users is submitting to doesn't accept figshare / github citations? It's unfortunate but true that many publishers disallow citations to unpublished / non-academic works. This is why many scientific software projects have resorted to publishing papers on their software — it's a hack to make a software project fit into the traditional social system of scientific credit.

DOIs are a technical glue that binds together the thousands of academic publishing outlets, but they do not solve the scientific or cultural issue of what is the minimum viable citable scientific product, and how those citations are generated, propagated, or valued.

Securing a DOI only solves a small slice of the problem of scientific credit — a point most colorfully expressed by this blog post from CrossRef, the largest DOI registrar for academic work: http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and...