Project Submission Requirements

Please adhere to the following requirements when submitting a project to the GW Project Registry.

• The project must be shared under a standard public license (OSI-approved license for software or AI, Open Data Commons or Creative Commons license for data or other works, or public-domain dedication).
• The project must be open source as per the OSI definition, OSI AI definition, or Open Definition, as applicable.
• The software must be hosted at a location where users can discover, view, clone, as well as open issues and propose changes without manual approval of (or payment for) accounts.
• The project must be a substantial original contribution by a GW student, faculty, or staff, and/or have originated from a GW-led collaboration.
• You must be a major contributor to the project you are submitting.

Substantial scholarly effort

The GW project registry is meant to include projects that represent substantial research or engineering effort by GW students, faculty, and staff.  As a rule of thumb, the minimum allowable contribution should represent not less than three months of work for an individual. Some factors that may be considered when judging effort include:

• Age of software (is this a well-established software project) / length of commit history.
• Number of commits.
• Number of authors.
• Total lines of code (LOC). Submissions under 1000 LOC will usually be flagged, those under 300 LOC will be desk rejected.
• Whether the software has already been cited in academic papers.
• Whether the software is sufficiently useful that it is likely to be cited by your peer group.

In addition, the GW OSPO requires that software should be feature-complete (i.e., no half-baked solutions), packaged appropriately according to common community standards for the programming language being used (e.g., Python, R), and designed for maintainable extension (not one-off modifications of existing tools). “Minor utility” packages, including “thin” API clients, and single-function packages are not acceptable.

Review Process

After submission:

• GW OSPO staff will review the submission and respond via email with any questions and to notify the submitter if the project is accepted or not.
• Submitters are asked to be patient when waiting for a review, but are also encouraged to follow up with any questions or updates via email to [email protected]
• Any student award submissions must be submitted by the entry deadline.  The project submissions may be reviewed and accepted after the deadline to still be eligible for the award.

Attribution

Much of these requirements were taken directly from “The Journal of Open Source Software, Submitting a paper to JOSS".  The JOSS web site is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license. © Copyright 2023, Open Journals.