The Citation Style Language: Maintaining a High-impact Open Source Project with Broad Community Participation

The Citation Style Language (CSL) provides more than 2,500 automated citation styles covering more than 10,000 publications and styleguides. CSL makes citing easier for countless academic authors, from high school students to senior faculty: CSL works in the background of reference managers, including Zotero, Mendeley, and Paperpile. It drives online citation generators, including those on Cambridge University Press, OSF, and the Open Journal System. CSL styles are also used in reproducibility-oriented writing formats such as RMarkdown and pandoc. Behind this massive impact is a small team of all-volunteer maintainers and contributions by more than 1,000 different users.

Sebastian Karcher, CSL’s top contributor and one of its maintainers, will describe the set-up of the CSL project and how CSL facilitates contribution by hundreds of contributors, many of whom are first-time CSL contributors. He will also touch upon the rewards and challenges of maintaining large open source projects.

Sebastian Karcher is the Director of the Qualitative Data Repository and a Research Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.

This seminar is part of the Open Source Program Office‘s Open Source Seminar Series.

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