Software items that we have formally issued as “releases” are archived as permanent, uniquely identified (with DOI) and citable records within the ready4 Zenodo community. Archived releases of ready4 software are useful as they are snapshots of a project at key milestones in its development (e.g. at the time an analysis was undertaken). As these milestones are purposely selected, archived releases are more likely to have undergone some testing and documenting prior to being released than code not selected for release.
A limitation of archived code libraries is that a greater knowledge of R is required to appropriately install R packages from Zenodo compared to the simpler installation process for the versions of code libraries stored on either GitHub or CRAN.