Our mission is to grow an open data ecosystem for digital biblical studies. To support this mission, we promote these guidelines:

  • Freely licensed. For content that is not code, we like Creative Commons Licenses. For code, we like MIT, Apache, and GPL -see http://choosealicense.com. We encourage licenses that require attribution, we dislike licenses that require asking permission - that just doesn’t scale.
  • Ethical. Always read and observe licenses from other content providers, tracking down the person who actually owns the copyright. Always cite original sources, even if they are now in the public domain. Do not fork an upstream resource unless you are doing something substantially different - help the developer of the upstream resource instead. Don’t use a resource to create a resource with a more restrictive license.
  • Human readable formats like XML, JSON, or well structured HTML with metadata.
  • Unicode, using NFC normalization and UTF-8 when feasible.
  • Publicly available in source code repositories, so changes are visible and available, and it is easy to track issues and suggest improvements or corrections.
  • Easily identifiable. Always tell people how to cite your work, and remember to cite the works you rely on to create your own, using a DOI if available. For example, Tauber, J. Ed. MorphGNT: SBLGNT Edition. Version 6.09. https://github.com/morphgnt/sblgnt DOI:XX.XXXX/XXXXXXX.
  • Designed to be used collaboratively with other resources.
  • Uses existing standards like TEI, Epidoc, and OSIS when they are a good match for the domain.

You can help build the community of open data for scholarly study by adding the following statement to your README:

  • For other freely licensed, high quality digital resources for scholarly study of Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, see the Biblical Humanities Dashboard (http://biblicalhumanities.org/dashboard/).

We are now beginning to negotiate standards to improve interoperability among resources. Check out https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/standards, and come talk to us on https://biblicalhumanities.slack.com/messages/standards/.