3 Authorship
3.1 Being an author
We welcome contributions to our course materials. If your contributions become substantial, you may be added as an author. We currently have no hard rule about what constitues sufficient work for an authorship. If you think you should be an author on one of our courses, please get in touch.
We also acknowledge smaller contributions under the Acknowledgements section of the course front page.
3.2 Citation
We use the Citation File Format (CFF) to keep information about authorship in our materials. Although this format is primarily designed for software and data, we adopted it following The Carpentries training community.
Each repository has a CITATION.cff file, which is used to automatically populate the course front page with citation format and author information.
3.3 Author roles
We use the website entry to indicate corresponding authors.
Unfortunately, at the present the CFF format schema does not allow adding an author “role” (see here). As a workaround, we use the author alias entry to record this information.
Although we don’t have a formal ontology for author roles, we propose some roles below (taking inspiration from CRT and DataCite). Some of these roles may be slightly redundant, but they should give enough choice to capture the diversity of contributions to our materials. We may revise this list from time to time.
- Conceptualisation: Contributes original ideas to the course design and content. This includes proposing new topics, suggesting overall structure for the materials and clarifying key concepts.
- Authoring: Writes substantative content by drafting new sections or significantly revising existing materials. This includes research, outlining, and drafting sections in detail.
- Editing: Revises the content to improve clarity, flow and consistency. This includes providing suggestions or directly making changes to improve the quality of the writing.
- Proofreading: Focuses on surface-level corrections. This includes grammar, spelling and formatting errors.
- Data curation: Finds, prepares, and tests datasets for use in demonstrations or exercises. This includes ensuring that the data is suitable for the course content and manageable within the constraints of a live course.
- Coding: Develops code or scripts used in the course. This includes creating examples for teaching or writing scripts that the students use for exercises.
- Software setup: Determines and/or tests software requirements for the course and writes documentation or scripts to recreate the environment. This can be used by the computing officer for setting up training environments and by the participants to recreate the environment on their own computers after the course.
- Scientific review: Domain expert who evaluates the accuracy and completeness of the materials.
- Pedagogical review: Reviews the training materials focusing on pedagogy and teaching effectiveness. Ensures that the learning objectives align with the content and exercises and are suitable for the target audience.
- Project coordination: Oversees the writing project, ensuring timelines, roles, and objectives are met.
If these feel limiting, it may be worth also looking at the list given on the All Contributors project.