What follows is a description of releasing a Maven project to a staging repository, whereupon it is scrutinized by the community, approved, and transferred to a production repository.
The steps involved are similar for any Apache project, with more specifics for Maven plugins, shared libraries, and Maven itself. The steps involved, and the relevant documents for each, are listed below.
The above links all provide specific information for those types of releases, but they all refer back to the common documentation: