There is a published paper associated with the software (e.g. JOSS article)

We recommend to write as soon as possible a peer-reviewed article describing the software.

This can be done on [JOSS, the Journal of Open Source Software](https://joss.theoj.org/) that is a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages.

Article are just 2-to-3 pages long and relates uniquely to the description and rational of the software features.

The very nice _edge_ effect of publishing on JOSS is that the submission process is based on a check list of requirements that overlap significantly with the present guidelines. Hence, **preparing a JOSS article is a nice and efficient method to adopt guidelines.**

Also, in publishing to JOSS quite early in your development roadmap (all features do not have to be implemented) you will have a DOI for your software (see guideline #49 ) to be used to properly reference it (see guideline #32 ).

Here are a few example of JOSS papers wrt Argo:
- Maze et al., (2020). argopy: A Python library for Argo ocean data analysis. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(53), 2425, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02425
- Dunnington et al., (2021). argodata: An R interface to oceanographic data from the International Argo Program. Journal of Open Source Software, 6(68), 3659, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03659