Academic Software Release Cycle

Every tool developed within the scope of the LBS will have a five-year life cycle, counted from the publication date of the paper associated with the tool. This period comprises two years of full support, provided by the authors of the paper, and three years of extended support, provided by the LBS IT team.

During the first two years after the publication of the paper, the original developers of the tool and the co-authors of the paper commit to ensuring that it remains operational and to providing user support. Full support includes security fixes, bug fixes, interface modifications and general user support.

The extended support period will be provided mainly by the LBS team and may not involve the original developers of the tool. During this period, support will be limited to maintaining the availability and accessibility of the tool to users. Fixes related to the results produced by the tool, new features and methodological changes are not covered by extended support.

If more significant changes to the tool are required, a new version must be released. The support period will be renewed as of the publication of a new paper associated with the new version of the tool. The participation of the original authors is not mandatory; however, it is recommended that they be invited to contribute to the development of the new version.

All software produced by members or collaborators of the LBS is subject to these guidelines.

License

Except where expressly stated otherwise, all software produced by the LBS will be made available as open source under the MIT license (https://opensource.org/license/mit). Documentation and other supplementary materials will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

Versioning

Version control of the tool must follow the pattern:

X.YY.MMDD

where:

• X corresponds to the major version of the tool and is associated with the paper that describes the published version;
• YY corresponds to the last two digits of the year;
• MM corresponds to the month, represented by one or two digits, without a leading zero (e.g., August = 8);
• DD corresponds to the day, always with two digits, including a leading zero when necessary (e.g., day 4 = 04).

Development versions and published versions

During development, versions 0.YY.MMDD must be used, both for alpha versions, intended for testing by the developers, and for beta versions, intended for testing by users.

After the publication of the paper presenting the tool, the major version must be updated to 1. Thus, the first published version will follow the pattern 1.YY.MMDD. For example, version 1.26.825 corresponds to the first stable version published on 25 August 2026.

The major version must only be incremented to 2, 3 and so on when a new paper directly related to the tool is published.

A new major version must not be created during the full support period of the previous version, defined as the two years following the publication of the tool.

In addition, a new publication must be justified by the introduction of new features or by substantial changes to the tool. A new publication must not be carried out exclusively to update the data.

Data updates

When an update results exclusively in the updating of the data, without changes to the features or to the major version of the tool, X must remain unchanged. In this case, only the temporal identification YY.MMDD must be updated. Thus, changes to the data do not imply a new major version or a new publication.

Authorship, ownership and identification

The software trademark must be attributed to the entity Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Systems (LBS), UFMG, Brazil. Ownership of each published version of the software is attributed, in order of importance: (1) to the first author of the version or, where applicable, equally to the group of authors credited with the same level of contribution; (2) to the project supervisor, identified as the last author; and (3) to the remaining collaborating authors. Thus, new versions may have an ownership attribution distinct from that of previous versions, according to the authors and contributions associated with the respective version.

New versions may be developed by other research groups, provided they are expressly authorised by the last author (project supervisor). However, each new version of the software must include the LBS-SRC license, as well as the corresponding copyright notices. The notice must preserve the year of creation, the name of the software and the laboratory information, followed by the notice corresponding to the current version, containing the year, the name of the tool, the version, the authors and, where available, a link to the DOI. For example:

This formulation makes the distinction explicit:

• LBS → trademark owner
• Version 1 → authors of version 1
• Version 2 → authors of version 2
• Version 3 → authors of version 3

And so on.

Recommendation (not mandatory). When there is a software registration, participation should be distributed as follows: 51% for the first author, 10% for the last author (project supervisor) and the remaining 39% for the other authors and participating institutions.