Include CITATION.cff v1.3.0 as a way to cite authors and their contributions

[ericearl]

What would you like to see added?

We at the NIMH Data Science & Sharing Team (@agt24, @dmoracze, @Arshitha, @ericearl) would like to see OpenNeuro support CITATION.cff v1.3.0 files as a way to cite authors and their contributions instead of only the "Authors" field of the dataset_description.json.

There has been some work in the citation-file-format/citation-file-format repo enabling "contributions" as a field (v1.3.0-alpha.0):
citation-file-format/citation-file-format#338

And some work in the bids-standard/bids-specification repo to include CITATION.cff as a supported format (PR#1525):
bids-standard/bids-specification#1525

I have uploaded an example dataset with a CITATION.cff file here:
https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds004654

That CITATION.cff follows the rules here with one exception: "ReferencesAndLinks" from the dataset_description.json are not omitted and replaced by "references" in the CITATION.cff file because I ran out of time before my upcoming leave to update all that in the CITATION.cff.

Alternatives

One consideration I think is that people may sometimes accidentally provide both the dataset_description.json fields and the CITATION.cff fields where the CITATION.cff file takes precedence (Authors, HowToAcknowledge, License, and ReferencesAndLinks). I feel as long as there is a clear bids-validator message that these fields are taking precedence over the dataset_description.json's fields, it is fine to have both, but advisable to have each bit of data in only one of the two files to prevent inconsistency.

Do you have any interest in helping implement the feature?

Yes, but I would need guidance

Additional information / screenshots

If you need me to do anything else to this input/example data, let us all know and one of us will get to it.

• @agt24
• @dmoracze
• @Arshitha
• @ericearl