Preferred citation

[ml-evs]

Hi all, is there a preferred citation for the ELN File Format specification? Perhaps it would be good to archive this repository on Zenodo with a DOI/ELN spec version number? We would obviously like to help advertise it in our work!

In fact, is there an official released version of the specification yet? I don't see any tags/releases in this repo.

[NicolasCARPi]

@FlorianRhiem @SteffenBrinckmann let's discuss tagging a version of the spec and pushing it to a repo.

[SteffenBrinckmann]

I agree that a citation would be amazing

[NicolasCARPi]

Versioning in the spec is #92. For the citations, we would first need to write an article in a peer-reviewed journal, and at the moment it is not on our roadmap.

[ml-evs]

Versioning in the spec is #92. For the citations, we would first need to write an article in a peer-reviewed journal, and at the moment it is not on our roadmap.

Could this repository not be automatically archived per version on Zenodo? That would yield a citable versioned DOI. In https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15001945/v1 we had to just link to this repo (which may not always exist).

[SteffenBrinckmann]

Yes, that could also be done. We could even archive fixed versions statically like Herbie-ELN does. We can discuss at the next meeting. In the meantime, something that always works for Latex:

@software{eln_file_format,
  author  = {{The ELN Consortium}},
  title   = {{ELN File Format (.eln)}},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/TheELNConsortium/TheELNFileFormat},
  urldate = {2026-08-17}
}

[NicolasCARPi]

I have connected github to zenodo, so all releases will get uploaded on zenodo. Latest release DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22915091.

See also #166.