Fair usage of GEOframe

 GEOframe is getting some momentum and various people wants to use it but they are maybe concern with co-authorship in the resulting works. To clarify some points, here it is an etiquette.

• The material we share with you can enable you to work in complete autonomy from us. In this case we do not require any co-authorship, as well as for minor help that will give with unselfishness. Citations of our work in appropriate manner will be required though.
• If the analysis involves modifications of the codes that requires common efforts, we will see how much will be our involvement and who will be involved. Our policy is to try to maintain the group of Authors in papers low but there could be exceptions. A fair approach is to include in papers who does fundamental work, i.e. work without which the research could not have been accomplished.
• Our code is open source and developed with open source tools. For the analysis of data and results we use open source tools. Potentially if you have a Java programmer, in your team, you can do the modifications of the code by yourself. Besides citations, etiquette would require that changes and addition to our code would be committed back to the community.
• Changes to our classes or methods do not imply that the original programmers of the code can be deprived of their authorship. The source code is copylefted but this does not mean "without authors". When substantial modifications are made, the Authors of the modifications can add their name to the Author list, but not eliminate previous Authors.  The code I modified is not "my code" but a code that has a history that needs to be maintained.  GEOframe source code plagiarism, in fact,  is defined as copying or reproducing source code without  mentioning  the original creators. That includes adapting the code minimally, moderately or including consistent fragments of the original author's code in your own code.
• A new GEOframe contribution is a new Java class, a new subroutine, whose contents are written entirely from zero without following schemes or algorithms already used in GEOframe for the same scope. By norm, algorithm origin should be cited too. 
• We can teach you how to do by yourself the modification of the codes.  We usually do for free, but help from us is not mandatory. We do with the perspective of improving our tools, improving the quality of our analysis and increasing the number of our users. 
• The preferable way to act when  modifying our codes is to branch it, modify it, and then issue a pull request to the maintainer of the main branch, with the scope to commit back the changes.
• New contributions, i.e. classes made from the scratch are welcomed. Only the authorized developers can add them to the main GEOframe components repository but being admitted is not that difficult. New developers are welcomed. 

For other complementary details we also wrote the GEOframe community publication policy