The Certified Vendor programme

Community is the default: reviewed by a maintainer, publisher identity unconfirmed. Verified publisher means we confirmed the person behind the submission belongs to the organisation they claim. Certified vendor is reserved for instrument, detector and analysis-software makers publishing first-party skills for their own hardware.

• 1 — First-party ownership
  Skills are published from a repository owned by the vendor organisation, and the GitHub organisation is confirmed by a maintainer at a company domain address.
• 2 — A real MCP endpoint
  Every certified skill declares an mcp_endpoint in its SKILL.md front matter and answers a live tool call. Documentation-only entries stay at community level.
• 3 — Hardware-validated claims
  Any calibration, dose, drift or resolution figure quoted in a skill must be reproducible on the instrument it names, with the acquisition conditions written into the skill documentation.
• 4 — Maintenance commitment
  A named maintainer, a public issue tracker, and a response window for breaking changes. Skills that go unmaintained for two sync cycles drop back to verified.
• 5 — Open licence on the skill
  The SKILL.md, tool schemas and examples carry an open licence. The model or service behind the endpoint can stay commercial — the interface cannot be closed.

• The brass certified vendor badge on every skill page, registry card and search result.
• A vendor collection page grouping all of your skills under one instrument family.
• Clearly-labelled featured placement on the index and on the technique pages your skills cover.
• Sync-time validation reports so a broken endpoint reaches you before it reaches a user.
• Co-promotion on the changelog and insights pages when new skills go live.

1. Publish at least one skill to the registry from your organisation's GitHub repository, following the SKILL.md template in the docs.
2. Request publisher verification from the contribute page using an email address on your company domain.
3. A maintainer runs each declared MCP endpoint and reviews the hardware claims with you. Expect one round of questions.
4. On approval the badge appears on your skills immediately and is re-checked at every registry sync.

Certification can be withdrawn: a dead endpoint, an unreproducible calibration claim, or a skill that quietly starts sending microscope data somewhere undisclosed all end it. Placement is always labelled as placement, and certification is never sold — a paid slot cannot buy the badge, and the badge does not buy a better ranking in search results.