# KORA Authorship And Contribution Policy

Date: `2026-05-06`

## Purpose

This policy defines fair authorship and contribution rules for KORA papers, technical reports, benchmark reports, and community evidence.

It is intended to make contribution expectations clear before paper, technical report, benchmark appendix, or community evidence work begins.

## Contribution Types

- core architecture contribution
- substantial code contribution
- benchmark methodology contribution
- reproducibility validation
- real workload case study contribution
- writing/review contribution
- minor docs fixes
- GitHub issue/comment feedback

## Authorship Levels

Core author:

- leads the intellectual, technical, empirical, or writing direction of the work
- participates in drafting, review, and final approval

Co-author candidate:

- makes a substantial intellectual, technical, or empirical contribution
- may become a co-author after review and approval by the lead author

Acknowledged contributor:

- contributes useful implementation, review, feedback, data, reproducibility work, or documentation support
- does not meet co-author criteria

Community benchmark contributor:

- contributes reproducible benchmark runs, workload cases, or validation notes that may be cited or summarized

General community participant:

- participates in discussions, stars the repo, asks questions, or shares general feedback

## Co-Author Criteria

Co-authorship requires substantial intellectual, technical, or empirical contribution and review/approval by the lead author.

Examples may include:

- designing core architecture or methodology
- contributing substantial implementation used in the paper
- creating benchmark methodology or reproducibility protocol
- providing a real workload case study with usable data and documentation
- writing or substantially revising technical sections

## Acknowledgement Criteria

Acknowledgement may be appropriate for:

- useful code review
- reproducibility validation
- issue reports that materially improve the work
- documentation or editorial support
- community benchmark contributions
- feedback that shapes examples or evaluation framing

## What Does Not Qualify By Itself

- GitHub star
- minor typo fix
- generic comment
- Telegram chat message
- simple benchmark run without usable data

## Tracking Mechanism

Contributions should be tracked through:

- GitHub issues
- Pull Requests
- GitHub Discussions
- documented benchmark reports

Paper-related contributions should reference issue, PR, discussion, or report links.

## Paper Roadmap Connection

Potential paper and report stages:

- technical report
- arXiv preprint
- conference/journal submission
- community benchmark appendix

Authorship and acknowledgement decisions should be revisited at each stage.
