contribution_acknowledgments

As the SasView project grows, the number of people that have contributed to the project is growing, leading to the need for some guidance about how and when to acknowledge those contributions. As a community developed and maintained project, it is important to be relatively generous in acknowledging contributions without trivializing the work that people have done. As we are using Zenodo to publish DOI’s we use those categories whether for DOI purposes or for anywhere else within the project (e.g. webpages) so as to maintain consistency.

PRODUCT

The product is considered to be the SasView project as a whole and not simply the sasview GUI program. “Direct contributions” include managing the servers and code for the marketplace, the publication database, sasmodels, sasdata, documentation including tutorials etc.

CREATORS (These get pulled in as “authors” in an academic citation)

Anybody who has made “significant and direct” contributions to the SasView project shall be considered a creator unless they decline. As per most standard publication protocols, acquisition of funding or general supervision does not qualify. Instead they should be listed under Contributor: Producers (See section on contributors).

CONTRIBUTORS (These do NOT get pulled in as “authors” in an academic citation)

As mentioned above, people whose only contribution lies in helping to acquire funding or general supervision of creators should be listed as contributors of type: Producers. All other contributions that do not rise to the level of creator but should be acknowledged, should be listed as contributors:Related Persons

AFFILIATION

The affiliation shall be listed as the last affiliation from which “significant” contributions were made. This gives recognition to the affiliation that funded the person during their contribution. In rare cases, it may be appropriate, if the creator asks, to change their affiliation to their current affiliation. This however should be done on a case by case basis as the current employer has not contributed.

REMOVAL FROM LIST

Trying to separate out contributions to the current release vs all previous releases is way too hard as there are few contributions one can imagine that won’t impact releases going forward. Even looking for names on lines of code is not sufficient since moving a block of code will change the name of the author using git blame. Furthermore, with the passage of time there may be loss of institutional memory about who some of the names are. Therefore the assumption is that names are added permanently unless there is a very clear and defensible reason to remove them. Removing names should be done with care and significant discussion.