I have been working on a little python cli project electrophysiology. I will write a paper about it but it is such a simple and small project that many journals may not want to publish it, however it could be really useful for other experimentalists. I personally don't care too much about giving credit, but I want people to be able to clearly communicate what tools they used to do their science and citing github repos or tags is not really done at the moment. Kudos to all involved for getting this to work!
This is a perfect fit for the SciPy conference. There are also several open journals that focus specifically on publishing openly licensed software used in academic work.
Citing software really varies by community. It is very consistently done in some communities, and is gaining broader acceptance in others, some with surprising rapidity (ecology comes to mind).
