5  Authorship

5.1 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.

5.2 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.

5.3 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, including proposing new topics, suggestions to structure the materials and clarification of key concepts.
  • Primary author: Writes content from scratch or significantly revises existing materials; researches, outlines, and drafts sections in detail.
  • Editor: Revises the content to improve clarity, flow and consistency; provides suggestions or directly makes changes to improve the quality of the writing.
  • Proofreader: Surface-level corrections, such as 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 as part of the course content. This may include creating programming examples or writing scripts that the students use for exercises.
  • Software: 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 reviewer: experts in the topic who evaluate the accuracy and completeness of the materials.
  • Pedagogical reviewer: Improves the training materials focusing on pedagogy and usability, ensuring the learning objectives align with the content and exercises.
  • Project coordinator: Oversees the writing project, ensuring timelines, roles, and objectives are met.