.. Licensed under a 3-clause BSD style license - see LICENSE.rst

==============
 Contributing
==============


VODF is an open, community-supported project. We therefore both accept and rely
on contributions from the astronomical community to keep the data model, format,
and tools up-to-date. Anybody who adheres to the :ref:`CodeOfConduct` is welcome
to contribute by both :ref:`ReportingIssues` or following the
:ref:`HowToMakeAChange` guide.


.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   :hidden:

   code_conduct
   changes
   dco

.. _ReportingIssues:

Reporting Issues
================

When opening an issue to report a problem, please try to provide a minimal
example that describes the issue along with details of the used data and VODF
version you are using. Issues should be reported as GitHub issues.

  
Promoting contributions
=======================

Even in the Open Source landscape, promoting the work of any is not only
**natural** but also a duty of the VODF leading parties. We will ensure
that *each contribution is correctly awarded for each product of the VODF
project*.

An *Authorship Policy* will be followed for releases, papers, and conferences.
Each VODF release will be published with an official DOI (through the `Zenodo
deposit <https://zenodo.org/>`_) that you can use as an Open Science
publication. This publication will also be associated with a list of *authors*
stored into our metadata files (``CITATION.cff`` and ``codemeta.json``).

In order to properly build the author list with you as contributor, VODF uses
:ref:`DCOaccept`. This is a lightweight way for
contributors to certify that they wrote or otherwise have the right to submit
the code they are contributing to the project. The used DCO is from the Linux
Foundation and can be found here :ref:`DCOaccept`.



Note: This text is freely inspired by the
`Contribution.md <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/astropy/astropy/main/CONTRIBUTING.md>`_
file of the `Astropy <https://www.astropy.org/>`_ project.