After creating or modifying a CSL style, consider sharing your new style if it might be of interest to other users (e.g. if the style is for an academic journal, publisher, university, or university department).

There are several requirements for distributing styles via the Zotero Style Repository and GitHub CSL 1.0 style code repository:

• The file name of the style should contain no characters other than lowercase roman letters (a-z), digits (0-9) and single hyphens (-). The file extension should be ”.csl”. E.g. use “style-name.csl” instead of “StyleName.csl”, “Style Name.csl” or “style_name.txt”. Words in the title are customarily separated by a hyphen, e.g. “academic-journal.csl” instead of “academicjournal.csl”.

• The style ID (set with the <id> element) should be of the form http://www.zotero.org/styles/file-name, without the .csl extension (e.g. http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa for apa.csl).

• The style link (set with the <link…/> element) should correspond to the id and filename.
  E.g.: <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/file-name" rel="self"/>

• The style should preferably include a license (set with the <rights> element) that permits sharing (most styles use the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License). E.g. use

  <rights>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License:
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</rights>

• If your style is largely derived from an existing style, list the authors and contributors of that style as contributors in your style. Add yourself as the style's author. Alternatively, you can mark the original style as a template by including a link to it in the info section of your style, e.g. <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/original-style" rel="template"/>

• Make sure your style validates.

There are two ways to submit CSL 1.0 styles for inclusion in the Zotero Style Repository:

The easiest way to submit styles is to post a link to your style code on the Zotero forums (do not paste style code directly into your post), using a code sharing website like http://gist.github.com.

Go to https://gist.github.com/ and copy and paste your style code into the large text box. Enter the file name of the style in the “name this file…” text box, and click the “Create Public Gist” button at the bottom of the page.

Create a new thread for your style in the Citation Styles category of the Zotero forum. In your post, ask for your style to be uploaded to the repository, and provide the link to the Gist (copy the URL from the address bar, which should be in the form of https://gist.github.com/766801. One of the Zotero developers or community members will then add your style to the repository. If you don't hear back within a week, feel free to post a reminder to the same thread.

While the process is slightly more complicated, you can also submit styles directly to the GitHub CSL 1.0 style repository. Fork the GitHub repository, commit your changes, and create a pull request. You can use your Git client of choice, but for new users we recommend SmartGit, which is free for non-commercial purposes.