Firedrake Zenodo integration: tools for reproducible science

Zenodo Zenodo

Zenodo provides a facility for archiving scientific data, such as software. Zenodo provides secure archiving and referability, including digital object identifiers (DOIs). Firedrake integrates with Zenodo and GitHub to provide Firedrake users with the ability to generate a set of DOIs corresponding to the exact set of Firedrake components which were used to conduct a particular simulation.

These DOIs can be used in citations in publications to provide a reference to the exact version of the software used, and thereby to improve the reproducibility of your computational science.

How to register DOIs for a version of Firedrake

This section assumes that you have a Firedrake installation which you have used to conduct some numerical experiment and which you wish to publish or otherwise record for posterity. It is assumed that your virtualenv is activated or that you otherwise have the firedrake scripts in your path.

  1. Use firedrake-zenodo to generate a JSON file containing the versions of Firedrake components you are using, as well as a title describing what this version was used for (this will appear online on Zenodo). For example:

    firedrake-zenodo -t "My paper title"

    You can additionally provide a single file that contains any extra (free-form) information that you want to appear in the uploaded Zenodo record:

    firedrake-zenodo -t "My paper title" --info-file README.txt

    This file could, for example, contain DOIs of any archived simulation code that you used over and above the core Firedrake components.

    This will create a file firedrake.json containing the required information.

  2. Create an issue on the Firedrake GitHub page asking that a Zenodo release be created. Attach the firedrake.json file to the issue. You can create the issue here.

  3. The Firedrake developers will generate a bespoke Firedrake release containing exactly the set of versions your JSON file specifies, as well as creating a Zenodo record collating these. You will be provided with a firedrake release tag of the form Firedrake_YYYYMMDD.N.

    You can see an example such a collated record here.

  4. You can use this release tag to generate a BibTeX entry (including the DOI) for the collated “meta”-record, which in turn links to all the individual components:

    firedrake-zenodo --bibtex Firedrake_YYYYMMDD.N

    Obviously, you substitute in your Firedrake release tag.

You can explore the full set of options for firedrake-zenodo with:

firedrake-zenodo -h

Installing an archived release

firedrake-install has support for installing a Zenodo-archived release. If you have a DOI for a particular Zenodo release, you can install the matching set of components with:

firedrake-install --doi MY_ZENODO_DOI


firedrake-update will not work out of the box in this scenario, because the components are checked out in a detached head state.

What else do you need to do?

Archive your code

firedrake-zenodo produces citable DOIs which point to the versions of Firedrake components you used. This covers your bases as far as concerns Firedrake, but doesn’t cover your code which uses Firedrake. Best practice in computational science also demands that you provide the code which you used to conduct your experiments. You could attach a tarball as a supplement to your paper, or you could also use Zenodo. Using Zenodo in combination with GitHub for this purpose is documented by github here.


If you archive your code before running firedrake-zenodo, you can ensure that the eventual release also references these DOIs by providing them as part of the --info-file argument.

Cite your sources

Citing custom DOIs for particular versions of Firedrake and its dependencies aids readers of your papers in reproducing your science. However it’s a supplement to, and not a replacement for, citing the published resources for the computational methods you are employing. Firedrake also offers support for citing the papers on which your computations depend. This is documented on the Citing Firedrake page.