The following document is intended to outline some example cases of submissions for Carpentries Lab peer review. Primarily, we want to make it clear when a single lesson should be submitted on its own, when multiple lessons should be submitted together, and how Carpentries Lab submissions relate to JOSE submissions.
If you are interested in submitting your lesson to JOSE upon acceptance in The Carpentries Lab, we encourage you to do so. However, JOSE submissions and Carpentries Lab submissions do not need to map to each other 1 to 1. For example, we accept submissions for lessons of any length to The Carpentries Lab, but acceptance at JOSE is more likely with larger bodies of work (i.e. longer lessons or entire curricula). If there are multiple lessons you would like to include in a JOSE submission, you do not necessarily need to submit them all to The Carpentries Lab at the same time. You could submit one lesson to The Carpentries Lab while the other is still being prepared, or while you are preparing the paper.md file for JOSE submission.
If you are submitting a single lesson to The Carpentries Lab on its own, you can go ahead and do so. If you are interested in submitting it to JOSE afterwards, you should include a paper.md file in the lesson repository.
If you have created a lesson you would like to submit to the Carpentries Lab, but think it might be too short for acceptance into JOSE, you could consider combining it with another similar lesson (or multiple lessons) in the Incubator for JOSE submission. These other lessons could be authored by anyone; if you believe your lesson would fit well with someone else’s, we recommend reaching out to the lesson’s authors to discuss collaborating on a JOSE submission. You can submit your lesson to the Carpentries Lab, and whenever the other lesson s are ready, it can be submitted to the Lab as well. You should also prepare another repository that is a "lesson set overview", similar to a Data Carpentry Workshop Overview page, introducing the lessons and explaining why they are grouped together. This is where the JOSE paper.md file should go.
If this overview repository contains no instructional content, rather serving as a brief introduction to the two lessons and linking to their separate sites and repositories, the overview repository does not need to go through full peer review in The Carpentries Lab. Instead, an editor will perform some editorial checks to ensure that it is accessible and formatted properly, and it will be accepted into the Carpentries Lab if and when the primary lessons have been accepted. If the overview repository contains any actual instructional content that would be taught or discussed during a workshop, it will have to go through full peer review in The Carpentries Lab.
If you have multiple lessons that are designed to form a continuous curriculum, they should be submitted to The Carpentries Lab together. A curriculum, in this context, does not mean lessons that can be taught together, but rather lessons that are designed to be taught together. For example, if each of your lessons depends on the subsequent lessons, they should be submitted together to The Carpentries Lab, since the merit of each lesson is only relevant in the context of the whole curriculum.
If you have multiple lessons but they are not dependent on each other and could be taught as individual lessons, they should be submitted as individual submissions to the Carpentries Lab. If you want to retain some grouping structure to your set of lessons, such that they can be identified as a collection in The Carpentries Lab, you can prepare an overview repository that introduces the collection of lessons, similar to a Data Carpentry Workshop Overview page, introducing the lessons and explaining why they are grouped together.
If this overview repository contains no instructional content, rather serving as a brief introduction to the two lessons and linking to their separate sites and repositories, the overview repository does not need to go through full peer review in The Carpentries Lab. Instead, an editor will perform some editorial checks to ensure that it is accessible and formatted properly, and it will be accepted into the Carpentries Lab if and when the primary lessons have been accepted. If the overview repository contains any actual instructional content that would be taught or discussed during a workshop, it will have to go through full peer review in The Carpentries Lab.
The overview repository can also be used as the repository for a JOSE submission, should you wish to keep your lessons together for JOSE.
The individual lessons do not need to be completed and submitted to The Carpentries Lab at the same time. They could be submitted as they are finished, and then an overview repository could be created after they are all finished.