AUTHORS.md

AUTHORS.md is a conventional plain-text or Markdown file placed at the root of a source repository that lists the people who created and maintain the project. It has no single governing specification — it is a long-standing convention, formalized in places like the GNU Coding Standards — but it is one of the most recognizable files in any open-source codebase. Its job is simple: give credit, and record who is responsible for the work.

• Attribution - Names the original authors and significant contributors, satisfying the credit clauses in many open-source licenses.
• Repository convention - Lives alongside siblings like LICENSE, README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and CHANGELOG in the root of a project.
• Human- and machine-readable - Simple enough to read at a glance, structured enough that tooling and package managers can parse it.
• License compliance - Some licenses require preserving authorship notices, and an AUTHORS file is the customary place to keep them.

In real API operations, an AUTHORS.md sits inside the same repository as an OpenAPI definition, SDKs, and documentation, and it quietly answers a governance question: who stands behind this API artifact? As more API definitions, schemas, and agent-facing artifacts get published and forked across the network, machine-readable authorship becomes part of provenance — letting both humans and agents trace a specification back to the team accountable for it.