Open Neuromorphic
Join Discord (3100+ joined)

ONR QA & Review Checklist

The official quality assurance and moderation checklist used by ONR reviewers to verify openness and summary accuracy.

This document outlines the official Quality Assurance (QA) checklist for the Open Neuromorphic Research (ONR) program. Reviewers use this checklist to evaluate staged entries before they are published to the website.

Our review process does not judge the scientific novelty or correctness of the research findings. Instead, it rigorously checks for open-source compliance and factual accuracy in our reporting.

1. The Openness & Tier Check

For a project to receive the “ONR Openness Verified” badge, the reviewer must manually confirm the following and assign the correct tier:

  • Reachability: Does the provided URL to the codebase or dataset actually work? Is the repository public? (We do not accept “code available upon reasonable request”).
  • License Verification: Does the repository contain a clear open-source license file or statement?
  • Tier Assignment:
    • Assign Gold if the license is fully permissive and OSI-approved (e.g., MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, CC-BY).
    • Assign Silver if the repository is open to view/run, but the license contains Non-Commercial (NC), No-Derivatives (ND), or strict academic-only clauses.

2. The Summary Accuracy Check

Our automated pipeline uses an LLM to synthesize the Discord discussion into a short, engaging article. The reviewer must confirm:

  • No Hallucinations: Does the summary accurately reflect what was actually said in the #onr-research Discord channel?
  • Neutral Tone: Is the summary free of institutional endorsement? It should state what the community discussed objectively, without implying ONM officially backs the research claims.
  • Author Attribution: Are the authors’ names formatted correctly in the metadata? Did the bot successfully map known Discord/GitHub handles to their canonical names?

3. Outcomes

  • Pass: The entry meets all criteria, the correct tier is assigned, and it is merged into the live website.
  • Needs Edit: The reviewer makes minor adjustments to the summary text or metadata formatting before merging.
  • Fail: The project is locked behind a paywall, closed-source, or has no license provided whatsoever. The entry is rejected.