Guide for Creating a Readme File for Code

The purpose of this document is to provide guidance on how to write README files for code. The ASAP Open Science Policy requires that all code generated as part of an ASAP funded project be deposited in a publicly accessible repository, assigned a persistent identifier, and that the identifier be cited in all publications that use the code. Throughout this document, we use the term code broadly to encompass all scripts, software, packages, libraries, macros, pipelines, algorithms, executables, batch files, and any other code that manipulates data in any way, including but not limited to cleaning data, preprocessing data, analyzing data, and producing figures, tables, and results. Code can be written specifically to clean and analyze the data for a particular study or with flexibility so that other researchers can easily use the code (e.g., software). This guide focuses on the former. The ASAP Open Science Policy also requires that a README file be included in each repository where code is deposited. README files must include enough information that someone who was not part of the study team can access the code, identify which scripts execute which functions (e.g., clean data, produce figures), and understand the scripts well enough to reuse them.