We are a community project, and it is important to give credit to the people who did the scientific research and those who curated our studies. So, we require that curators of our curation app be authenticated users so that we can maintain a chain of provenance information for how studies make it into our synthetic tree pipeline.

The most obvious solution would be to create a database of users and require people to set up an account. Instead of taking this route, the Open Tree project has opted to have users authenticate using a third party service (currently GitHub authentication is the only service we support). Why did we take this approach?

1. We didn’t want to try to position ourselves as some sort of crucial gate-keeper for belonging to a collaborative community of phylogenetic researchers.

2. We didn’t want to have to worry about securely storing user data. In our current system we hold almost no user information, and users can use a feature-rich user account management interface that some one else maintains.

3. We want to make the project’s efforts truly open. All input from users is pushed to publicly viewable location immediately. So, the developers of the Open Tree infrastructure do not have any private knowledge about the users. And community curation of phylogenetic knowledge is always shared with everyone. Specifically:

• We push user comments to our feedback repository as soon as they are saved.
• Curated studies are pushed to https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/phylesystem-1 whenever a user saves a study.
• Collections of trees go https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/collections-1 whenever they are edited.
• Taxonomic amendments at https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/amendments-1 when they are created.