The following text is copied from CodeMeta, 2019.
The CodeMeta Project Motivation Research relies heavily on scientific software, and a large and growing fraction of researchers are engaged in developing software as part of their own research (Hannay et al 2009). Despite this, infrastructure to support the preservation, discovery, reuse, and attribution of software lags substantially behind that of other research products such as journal articles and research data. This lag is driven not so much by a lack of technology as it is by a lack of unity: existing mechanisms to archive, document, index, share, discover, and cite software contributions are heterogeneous among both disciplines and archives and rarely meet best practices (Howison 2015).