  Scientific software registries and repositories serve various roles in their
respective disciplines. These resources improve software discoverability and
research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster
preservation of computational methods that might otherwise be lost over time,
thereby supporting research reproducibility and replicability. However,
developing these resources takes effort, and few guidelines are available to
help prospective creators of registries and repositories. To address this need,
we present a set of nine best practices that can help managers define the
scope, practices, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories.
These best practices were distilled from the experiences of the creators of
existing resources, convened by a Task Force of the FORCE11 Software Citation
Implementation Working Group during the years 2019-2020. We believe that
putting in place specific policies such as those presented here will help
scientific software registries and repositories better serve their users and
their disciplines.
