Welcome to the central repository for the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) of Scientific Computing Studio. This repository houses the legal agreement and the automated bot that manages signatures across all our projects.
To clarify the intellectual property licenses granted for contributions from any person or entity, we must have a CLA on file, signed by each contributor. This agreement ensures that the Scientific Computing Studio has the necessary legal rights to distribute your contributions while also protecting you as a contributor.
Read the full agreement here: CLA Document.
You do not need to print or email any documents. We use an automated bot to handle signatures directly within GitHub.
When you submit your first Pull Request to any repository under the Scientific Computing Studio umbrella, simply leave the following exact phrase as a comment on your PR:
I have read the CLA Document and I hereby sign the CLA
- Our centralized GitHub Action will detect your comment.
- The bot will securely record your GitHub Handle, ID, and the timestamp in our public
signatures/cla.jsonregistry. - The bot will leave a confirmation comment on your PR indicating that your signature was successful.
You only need to sign the agreement once. After your signature is recorded, you are cleared to contribute to any repository within the organization.
You must include cla-sign-listener.yml and cla-verify-listener.yml in any new repository under .github/workflows/.
You must also add a Personal Access Token (PAT) to the Repository Secrets called CLA_BOT_PAT with the following fine-grained permissions:
- Read access to metadata;
- Read and write access to code and pull requests.
Scientific Computing Studio values first-principles engineering and true concept mastery. We require our software contributions to reflect genuine human authorship.
To maintain our ability to license this software, we must ensure a clean, legally unencumbered chain of intellectual property. Under current United States law, code generated purely by Artificial Intelligence cannot be copyrighted. Because you do not own the copyright to AI-generated code, you cannot legally grant us a license to use it via our Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Before submitting a Pull Request, you must ensure your contribution complies with current legal standards regarding AI and copyright:
- The US Copyright Office has firmly established that intellectual property protection requires traditional human authorship. If an AI tool writes the code based on a prompt, the AI, not the human, is considered the author, rendering the work uncopyrightable. (See: US Copyright Office Statement of Policy: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence)
- Federal courts have repeatedly upheld that AI systems cannot hold copyrights, and humans cannot claim copyrights for works autonomously generated by AI systems. (See: Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 22-1564 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023))
We recognize that modern development environments often include AI-assisted tooling. Our policy distinguishes between tooling and authorship.
Using AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, or ChatGPT) as a highly advanced autocomplete, for generating standard boilerplate, finding syntax errors, or writing basic unit test scaffolding. The core logic, architectural decisions, and vast majority of the keystrokes must be yours.
Prompting an AI to write functions, classes, or modules and copy-pasting the raw output into our codebase. If a court would consider the AI the primary author of the specific block of code, it cannot be merged into this repository.
If you used AI to assist in the formulation of complex logic, algorithmic design, or significant structural elements of your Pull Request, you must explicitly disclose this in your PR description. This allows our maintainers to evaluate the submission and ensure it does not pollute the repository with uncopyrightable material.
We highly encourage and value contributions from students, researchers, and faculty members. However, because contributing to our projects requires you to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), you must ensure you actually hold the legal rights to the code you are submitting.
Intellectual Property (IP) policies vary wildly between universities and research institutions. Before you contribute, please verify the following:
- If you are writing code while funded by a government grant (e.g., NSF, NIH, DOE) or a private sponsored research agreement, your institution or the sponsor may legally own the copyright to your work.
- Check your university’s specific IP or "Work Made for Hire" policies. Some universities automatically claim ownership of any software generated by their faculty and staff, while others allow creators to retain ownership of their scholarly software.
- Many universities require that you only make "incidental use" of university resources (like supercomputing clusters or lab equipment) if you intend to retain ownership of your outside work.
If your institution owns the IP to your code, you cannot sign the individual CLA on your own behalf. Instead, an authorized representative from your university's Technology Transfer Office (or equivalent legal department) may need to sign a Corporate CLA to grant the necessary permissions.
Disclaimer: We are scientists and developers, not lawyers. It is your responsibility to ensure you are complying with your employer's or university's policies before submitting a pull request.
We love seeing high school students and young developers diving into scientific computing! We highly encourage you to learn, explore, and contribute to our repositories.
However, because contributing requires agreeing to a legal contract (the Contributor License Agreement), there are special rules if you are under the age of 18 (or the age of legal majority in your country):
- By law, minors cannot enter into binding legal agreements. If you leave the signature comment on a Pull Request, it is not legally valid.
- To contribute your code, a parent or legal guardian must review the CLA and agree to it on your behalf.
Parent/Guardian Signature Template
If you are a minor, please have your parent or legal guardian review the CLA. Your parent or guardian must copy the following text, fill in the bracketed information, and post it as a comment on your Pull Request to legally authorize your contribution.
I, [Parent/Guardian's Full Legal Name], am the parent or legal guardian of the minor contributor [Minor's Full Legal Name], who operates the GitHub account @[Minor's GitHub Username].
I have reviewed the Contributor License Agreement for Scientific Computing Studio. On behalf of myself and the minor contributor, I fully consent to the terms of the agreement, authorize this contribution, and grant the licenses described within.
I have read the CLA Document and I hereby sign the CLA.