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 # the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf
+
+## What is it?
+
+The Open Astrophysics Bookshelf is a collection of astrophysics textbooks
+that are open-licensed and open to contribution for others.
+
+Books are written in LaTeX and licensed using a creative-commons
+license.  Each text will be its own repo under the OAB organization
+page.  Texts would be free to adopt whatever style they want, but
+should accept contributions from the community (via pull-requests).
+Contributions should be noted through a hierarchical author lists with
+the lead author/curator being the one who started and wrote most of
+the text and guides the theme of the text, contributing authors who
+wrote chapters or large sections, and then community authors who fixed
+typos or made smaller changes.  In addition to explicit
+acknowledgements of contributions in the texts themselves, the git log
+will always keep track of contributions.
+
+The books would be living, in the sense that they'd continually
+evolve.  Different texts could either stamp editions (via a git tag)
+from time to time or just record the git hash in the PDF.  With the
+source available, we could also produce versions optimized for tablets
+vs. screen vs. printed-page from the same source.
+
+
+## How can I contribute?
+
+You can add to an existing text by forking it, making corrections,
+improving some discussion, or writing a new chapter, and then issue
+a pull request to have your changes incorporated into the main repo.
+
+If you have your own book that you would like to add to this bookshelf
+that create an Issue under the `oab_organization` repo requesting that
+a new repository for your text be created.