General comments on the PEN of 2025

[bkhelifi]

Dear all,

I have a general quetion on the note content, that could not be associated to the proposed improvement but it is an opportunity to ask.

• Section 2.3 Citation
  It is mentionned in the derived requirement that info for citation and/or acknowledement should be retrieved. This is indeed very important. But, the data origin aims also to the recognition and the valorization, which is one strong element of Open Science to improves.
  My questions lies on the use, in general, of "acknowledgement" to refer to data or software. As widely recognized, text included in acknowledgements is not used by editors (or ADS) to create cross-references between the 3 pillars of open science (science publication, software, data) and to make statistics on a use of a dataset or a software. Consequently, any information placed in the acknowledgement is effectively 'lost' (in general, as least today with the current s/w tools). And this lack of a proper referecing negatively impacts the recognition and the valorization of Open Science products. Personnaly, I always recommand avoiding the use of acknowledgements, and instead insist on a proper citation (with a DOI in the reference section).
  Is there a general IVOA recommendation regarding the use of proper citation versus acknowledgement? Should we not emphasize the use of citation more strongly?
  P.S. This question might be slightly out of scope for this PEN, but it is relevant to the broader discussion.