Governance

The goal of the Bioregistry is to enable community-driven curation and maintenance of a registry of prefixes and their associated metadata. This is a first suggestion for some minimal governance (heavily inspired by https://github.com/mapping-commons/SSSOM/issues/82, since that is a similar community-driven effort). Discussion for this governance is taking place on https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/issues/156.

Manually Updating the Bioregistry

Manual updates to the contents of the Bioregistry (e.g., adding a new prefix, merging prefixes, splitting prefixes, or updating a prefix’s associated metadata) must be done either in the form of an issue or a pull request.
The only updates that aren’t considered manual are the ones done by the CI system on a chronological basis.
Manual updates can be accepted if all continuous integration tests pass and a member of the Bioregistry Review Team approves. It’s best practice that a member of the Review Team does not approve their own updates.
New prefixes must conform to https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/issues/158 and https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/issues/133 and the contribution guidelines.
Attribution information for the requester and reviewer of manual updates must be collected in the form of an ORCiD identifier.

Review Team

The Bioregistry Review Team is responsible for reviewing requests for new prefixes, merging prefixes, splitting prefixes, and updating metadata associated with prefixes. It is implemented as a GitHub team that has “triage” permissions (e.g., able to maintain issues and pull requests).

Until all of the potential update interactions have been codified with GitHub actions workflows, the review team is also responsible for either helping the requester create an appropriate pull request or creating an appropriate pull request directly if none has been given by the requester.

Membership

Membership to the Bioregistry Review Team is requested on the issue tracker
Membership to the Bioregistry Review Team is granted at the discretion of the existing Bioregistry Review Team using Disapproval Voting
Members must join and participate the OBO Foundry Slack, the #prefixes channel, and the Review Team private chat.
Members must be listed alphabetically by family name below

Member Onboarding

Add to private channel on OBO Foundry Slack
Add to the GitHub review team (note that GitHub hasn’t yet enabled teams to be publicly viewed, and this link currently results in a 404 error)
Add to membership list below in alphabetical order by last name in along with their GitHub handle, ORCID identifier, and date of joining.

Removing Members

Members who unresponsive for 3 or more months can be removed by another member of the Bioregistry Review Team
Members who do not conduct themselves according to the Bioregistry Code of Conduct can be suggested to be removed by a member of the Bioregistry Review Team.

Member Offboarding

Remove from the private channel on OBO Foundry Slack
Remove from the the GitHub review team (note that GitHub hasn’t yet enabled teams to be publicly viewed, and this link currently results in a 404 error)
Add the date of exit and move their name and information ot the previous members list.

Members

Meghan Balk (@megbalk; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2699-3066; joined 2022-01)
Tiffany Callahan (@callahantiff; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8169-9049; joined 2022-01)
Benjamin M. Gyori (@bgyori; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9439-5346)
Charles Tapley Hoyt (@cthoyt; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4423-4370)
Tiago Lubiana (@lubianat; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2473-2313; joined 2022-01)

Previous Members

We’re a new team and don’t have any yet!

Core Development Team

The Core Development Team is responsible for maintaining the codebase associated with the Bioregistry, which includes the Python package, the Bioregistry web application, docker configurations/artifacts, and related GitHub repositories. It is implemented as a GitHub team that has “maintain” permissions (e.g., able to write to the repo as well as maintain issues and pull requests).

Contributions to the Bioregistry code must be submitted as pull requests to https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry. They must conform to the contribution guidelines. Code contributions must be approved by a member of the Core Development Team as well as pass continuous integration tests before merging.

Membership

Membership to the Bioregistry Core Development Team is requested on the issue tracker
It is required that a potential member of the Bioregistry Core Development Team has previously made a contribution as an external contributor (to which there are no requirements)
Membership to the Bioregistry Core Development Team is granted at the discretion of the existing Bioregistry Core Development Team using Disapproval Voting
Members must be listed alphabetically by family name below

Members

Benjamin M. Gyori (@bgyori; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9439-5346)
Charles Tapley Hoyt (@cthoyt; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4423-4370)

Publications / Attribution

All members of the core development and review teams are automatically authors on Bioregistry papers and can propose other co-authors.

All contributors to the data underlying the Bioregistry, regardless of curation size, should be considered for authorship on Bioregistry papers. These contributions are automatically summarized at https://bioregistry.io/contributors.

Larger external institutional contributors should be acknowledged in the following places, where appropriate:

On the support and funding sections of the repository’s main README.md
On the acknowledgements page of https://bioregistry.io

Bootstrapping governance

This document’s governance will go into effect after additional rounds of editing and community discussion. The Bioregistry Review Team will announce when it is officially in effect.

Updating governance

This governance must updated through the following steps:

Create an issue on the Bioregistry’s issue tracker describing the desired change and reasoning.
Engage potential stakeholders in discussion.
Solicit the Bioregistry Review Team for a review.
The Bioregistry Review Team will accept changes at their discretion.

This procedure doesn’t apply to cosmetic or ergonomics changes, which are allowed to be done in a more ad-hoc manner. The Bioregistry Review Team may later make explicit criteria for accepting changes to this governance.

Partners

Please see https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/issues/755 for discussions about a governance model for partnerships between the Bioregistry and identifier space owners.