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 Code of Conduct is welcome to contribute by both Reporting Issues or following the How to make a change? guide.

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) 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 Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). 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 Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).

Note: This text is freely inspired by the Contribution.md file of the Astropy project.