As digital objects, the proper attribution of credit for KIM Items warrants
that a distinction be made between (1) who uploaded them to openkim.org, (2)
who maintains them, (3) who created their underlying intellectual content, and
(4) who is responsible for their computer implementation. Accordingly, the
following authorship roles are defined in the kimspec.edn file of each KIM
Item:
Contributor: The contributor is the person who initially contributed the digital object to OpenKIM. This role includes assembly of the content, completion of the online submission form, and interaction with OpenKIM staff. The contributor is added to the "contributors" field of the object's DOI entry along with the OpenKIM organization.
Maintainer: The maintainer is the person responsible for ongoing maintenance of the digital object. This includes corrections of identified bugs, updates to support KIM API changes, and corrections or updates to metadata. Only the maintainer and KIM administrators may upload new versions of a digital object.
Developer: The developer is the person or persons who participated in creating the core intellectual content of the digital object, e.g. the functional form of an interatomic model or a specific parameter set for it. This does not encompass the specific implementation of the digital object such as its source code or formatting. In the event that an item has more than one developer, they should be listed in an order that reflects their relative contributions. The developers of a digital object would typically be the authors on primary literary works cited by the digital object and would share the same ordering. (Note that not all authors on a publication may be developers of the item in cases where the publication has a broader scope than only that encompassed by the digital object.) OpenKIM staff will consult with the authors to determine developer status and the order in which they will be listed.
Implementer: The implementer is any *additional* person or persons not listed as a developer who is responsible for the source code implementation or format in which a digital object is stored on OpenKIM. (The implementer field can be an empty list in the event that those responsible for the implementation of the item are already present as developers.) Some examples of people who would be implementers but not developers are ones who created a new implementation for an interatomic potential or reformatted its parameter file(s) to be compatible with a KIM model driver. By contrast, someone who has only gathered preexisting content and generated accompanying metadata is neither a developer nor an implementer. Such a person would be listed as the contributor. For example, if someone acquired a potential parameter file directly from the LAMMPS distribution and uploaded it to KIM as a model for use with a model driver, they would receive recognition as the contributor but would not rise to the level of developer or implementer. If an item has multiple implementers, they should be listed in descending order of their relative contribution. The implementer and developer lists of an item are concatenated to arrive at a single list that will be added to the "creators" field of the object's DOI entry.