Guide Maintainers and Lesson Developers on Lesson Citation

[tobyhodges]

Since CFF was adopted as the default for lesson citation (https://github.com/carpentries/sandpaper/pull/583), we will need to provide Maintainers and lesson developers with advice on what information to include in their lessons' CITATION.cff files, and how to keep that information up-to-date. Ideas for what to include:

1. lessons should use type: dataset in their CFF, not type: software
2. do we make a recommendation of author list order, and criteria for inclusion in that list?
3. when, and how often, should maintainers update the CFF?
4. how should other lessons be referenced in the CFF, e.g. where a lesson is based on someone else's work? (This suggestion from @ocaisa based on https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/issues/538#issuecomment-2051488372)

[maneesha]

@tobyhodges Can we move this issue to the new handbook?

[maneesha]

@tobyhodges I am moving this to the new handbook.

[tobyhodges]

I propose to draft and include this after the handbook launch. We are still waiting for the next version of the CFF specification to be released before we can roll CITATION.cff files out across our official lessons. I want to handle that process centrally, to ensure consistency across our many lesson repositories. My concern is that including this in the handbook now might give Maintainers the impression that we want them to take care of it themselves.

[maneesha]

@froggleston says this will be included in the November workbench release. @ErinBecker and @tobyhodges will be co-working on what changes are needed so we can implement this in 2026 Q2.