Update 'Suggested Citation' section on the TTW Index page

[aleesteele]

Currently, our citation suggestion looks like this.

The Turing Way Community, Becky Arnold, Louise Bowler, Sarah Gibson, Patricia Herterich, Rosie Higman, … Kirstie Whitaker. (2019, March 25). The Turing Way: A Handbook for Reproducible Data Science (Version v0.0.4). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3233986

Taken from: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/index.html#citing-the-turing-way

This was initial proposed as a structure in 2019(?), but we've had a lot of a discussions since then around what author authorship within the community, that stem all the way back to the project's origins & development (see: #1034).

We generally don't attribute individual authorship to either chapters or the guides more broadly, but this citation suggestion does cite individual names (some of which are no longer associated with the project).

Questions for folks:

• Are we able to create a suggested citation that focuses more on the collective efforts, that perhaps cites at "The Turing Way community" collectively as authors?
• If names need to be included in the citation, how do we go about choosing those cited names? (And how can we ensure that authorship extends beyond writing to other types of contributions, like project maintenance and localisation).

Flagging the project co-leads, as well as Esther – who brought up the discussion on slack!

[aleesteele]

Quoting from @KirstieJane on #1034 - which has influenced how we think about attribution within the project currently (flag: this dates back to 2020!):

In GOVERNANCE.md at the moment we have a good policy for covering contribututions and individual authorship I think. What we haven't done - which is honestly something I wake up in the night feeling terrible about - is uploaded the versions of the book to zenodo to actually implement the policy.

In short: substantial contributions make you an author, I decide what substantial means (we can adapt that to a governance team in the future..... or now?) and literally anything at all (above zero) where you consent to being acknowledged in the repository makes you a contributor.

What we're missing though is a way to disagregate all the authors and all the contributors - not all authors have contributed the same amount to the project and it would be good to highlight their work much better than we are doing at the moment.

We're also missing ways to acknowledge teams.

The idea I've always had is that each author - and each team / organisation has a paragraph about their contributions to the project in a file called community members.

There's one hill that I'll almost certainly die on - it would take a very concerted effort from the community to have me shift on this - which is that I don't want authorship (including organisational) on individual chapters.

[EstherPlomp]

I'm for a collective author citation, such as The Turing Way community. I think all of the contributors should be listed otherwise and that will just result in being listed as "...." for most of the people anyway in any citations. It would be nice if sub sections could perhaps be cited more specifically, but that is also a lot of work..

[RichardLitt]

I think that collective author citations obscure efforts from researchers who may rely upon citations for academic standing. Citing more authors has no major downside (please let me know if I am wrong).

In short: substantial contributions make you an author, I decide what substantial means (we can adapt that to a governance team in the future..... or now?) and literally anything at all (above zero) where you consent to being acknowledged in the repository makes you a contributor.

This governance plan is not sustainable and could be exclusionary. I would advocate for building a governance plan sooner, so as to not rely on a single decision-maker.