Code Donation

CIG develops, supports and disseminates community-accessible software for the geodynamics research community. As such, codes must meet community standards and be within the scope of the organization to be accepted.  A hosted code is supported by CIG Staff in an open source repository which utliizes an automatic build and test framework; automated document generation, and provides file space for related files. 

By donating codes to CIG, researchers expose their code to a wider audience and provide provenance for published research.  This helps to prevent duplication of effort, clarifies methodology, provides a referenceable source and aids researchers who are interested in similar problems.

CIG codes are currently hosted in a GIT repository.

Standards 

All CIG codes, donated or developed in-house, are expected top meet the following criteria:

• Domain Relevance. Codes in geodynamics should include referenceable scientific work in geophysics citing methodology.
• Open Source License. All codes are published under open source licensing.  GNU GPL is recommended.
• Documentation. The User Manual should document the history of the code, methodology, and science problem(s) it addresses.  The manual should describe inputs and outputs and examples.  If applicable, all examples should be included in the source distribution.
• Source Code. A complete source distribution should include all source code and specification of all external libraries (including version numbers) it links to.  Indicate what platforms and compilers the code will compile on.
• Examples.  Provide example input, output files and scripts tuned for new users.

For more information, please refer to our Best Practices on our website in our git repo.

Process

Donated codes are reviewed by the Science Steering Committee whose recommendations are forwarded to the Executive Committee. If approved, CIG will host the code by creating a software web page and migrating the code to its repository.  CIG will continue to maintain the code at the accepted service level unless otherwise warranted in which at such time its status may change.

Questions

For further questions and instructions, please contact support at:  help--at--geodynamics.org .