This seems like quite a big deal -- the parts were in place already, but having a route promoted by Github will probably make a big difference in academia. The idea of having a citable DOI for your work exerts a magic that is possibly out of proportion to its practical advantages for research code.
I imagine the private project thing may be a blow to Bitbucket, which is quite widely used by academics.
The pessimistic part of me finds it quite discouraging that this will only centralise things more at Github. The optimistic part hopes for more matter-of-course publication of research code and a happier relationship between researchers and the software they write.
And it's a very nice site! I might suggest making it more clear one of your help or about pages what licenses are acceptable for hosting. I am not a UK academic or a sound analysis computational scientist, but it's something that I would be concerned about when choosing a place to store my code.
I imagine the private project thing may be a blow to Bitbucket, which is quite widely used by academics.
The pessimistic part of me finds it quite discouraging that this will only centralise things more at Github. The optimistic part hopes for more matter-of-course publication of research code and a happier relationship between researchers and the software they write.
(Disclaimer: I run a subject-specific academic code repository, http://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk)