GitHub repository ownership as a PhD student in a lab I'm a PhD student and use GitHub to track and share code for nearly all of my research projects, most of which are largely coding-based work in the field of remote sensing.
Our lab is discussing how to best keep track of all the software related projects we do. I generally start and manage projects where I'm first author under my own GitHub account. I recently started a organization account for our lab and I have a repository in there that is basically just a README listing everyone's projects and links to them. We also have this information on our lab website.
I'm considering the pros and cons of having projects owned by the lab account, but I am leaning somewhat away from this, because most of these projects are individually maintained by students or lab technicians and it seems fairer to have them get credit on their own accounts. But we all want the lab to get credit and for people to know certain tools were developed within and supported by our lab.
Anyway, I'm just curious what other labs do and to get a feel for best practices here.
It's fairly common for labs to have GitHub organizations. There are multiple reasons for this.

First of all, it doesn't prevent the authors from getting credit. The commits will be shown as commits of the individual, not as commits of the organization.
Labs often have a scientific &quot;brand&quot; in terms of what they research. If the GitHub repository is completely personal, then your work does not fully contribute towards this brand. But contributing towards the joint scientific output of the groups is a major reason why you may get funding from the group's third party funding.
Perhaps most importantly, PhD students eventually leave the lab. They can continue maintaining their projects if they want to - there is no necessity to be an administrator of a GitHub organization to continue maintaining existing repositories. But what if the leaving PhD students choose not to maintain the code? If the repository is personal, then other people in the lab then cannot commit bugfixes to the repository. They could fork it, but once the repository link is in a scientific paper, the original repository is the official one. And this is problematic if the group's brand depends on the repository because it's a central part of their overall story.