On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Adrian Du?a <dusa.adrian at unibuc.ro> wrote:> Hi Gabriel, > > On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> > wrote: > >> [...] >> >> At the very least, this is seems to be a flagrant violation of the >> *spirit* of the CRAN policy, which AFAIK is intended to enforce >> acknowledgement of the contributions of all copyright holders in the >> package. The fact that you are trying to bypass the policy by suggesting >> users use an unofficial citation which would not comply with the policy >> while maintaining an official one which complies, but which you don't want >> users to see is probably a suggestion that you shouldn't do that. >> > > > But that is the very point: I read the CRAN policies twice, and there is no > official guideline on how to compile the citation. > Regarding the Source packages, the policies mention: > > ###### > The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all > components of the package must be clear and unambiguous (including from the > authors specification in the DESCRIPTION file). Where code is copied (or > derived) from the work of others (including from R itself), care must be > taken that any copyright/license statements are preserved and authorship is > not misrepresented. > Preferably, an ?Authors at R? would be used with ?ctb? roles for the authors > of such code. Alternatively, the ?Author? field should list these authors > as contributors. > > Where copyrights are held by an entity other than the package authors, this > should preferably be indicated via ?cph? roles in the ?Authors at R? field, or > using a ?Copyright? field (if necessary referring to an inst/COPYRIGHTS > file). > > Trademarks must be respected. > ###### > > Now, that requirement is already met: the former author is still in the > authors' list. So the contribution of the former author is duly > acknowledged, but the fundamental issue of my question related to the > citation file, for which the CRAN policies doesn't offer any other > information. > > If the spirit of the CRAN policies is to enforce citing each and every one > of the authors, then I don't understand why the citation from package Rcmdr > meets this spirit, while my suggestion doesn't.I'd recommend that you read https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shiny/DESCRIPTION and compare it to citation("shiny"). Authors, but not contributors, all listed in the citation. Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/
Hadley, With all due respect, I'm not sure what exactly your deliniation between author and contributor is, but from what I can tell I don't agree with it.>From the blogpost regarding your new purrr package:"Purrr wouldn?t be possible without Lionel Henry <https://github.com/lionel->. He wrote a lot of the package and his insightful comments ..." And yet he is listed as a contributor in the DESCRIPTION file, and thus in your view not worthy of being in the citation even as a non-first author? That does not jive with what I understand to be "standard practice" with regard to software-related publications, and it certainly isn't what I would choose to do in that situation. Best, ~G On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 4:59 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Adrian Du?a <dusa.adrian at unibuc.ro> wrote: > > Hi Gabriel, > > > > On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> > > wrote: > > > >> [...] > >> > >> At the very least, this is seems to be a flagrant violation of the > >> *spirit* of the CRAN policy, which AFAIK is intended to enforce > >> acknowledgement of the contributions of all copyright holders in the > >> package. The fact that you are trying to bypass the policy by suggesting > >> users use an unofficial citation which would not comply with the policy > >> while maintaining an official one which complies, but which you don't > want > >> users to see is probably a suggestion that you shouldn't do that. > >> > > > > > > But that is the very point: I read the CRAN policies twice, and there is > no > > official guideline on how to compile the citation. > > Regarding the Source packages, the policies mention: > > > > ###### > > The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all > > components of the package must be clear and unambiguous (including from > the > > authors specification in the DESCRIPTION file). Where code is copied (or > > derived) from the work of others (including from R itself), care must be > > taken that any copyright/license statements are preserved and authorship > is > > not misrepresented. > > Preferably, an ?Authors at R? would be used with ?ctb? roles for the > authors > > of such code. Alternatively, the ?Author? field should list these authors > > as contributors. > > > > Where copyrights are held by an entity other than the package authors, > this > > should preferably be indicated via ?cph? roles in the ?Authors at R? > field, or > > using a ?Copyright? field (if necessary referring to an inst/COPYRIGHTS > > file). > > > > Trademarks must be respected. > > ###### > > > > Now, that requirement is already met: the former author is still in the > > authors' list. So the contribution of the former author is duly > > acknowledged, but the fundamental issue of my question related to the > > citation file, for which the CRAN policies doesn't offer any other > > information. > > > > If the spirit of the CRAN policies is to enforce citing each and every > one > > of the authors, then I don't understand why the citation from package > Rcmdr > > meets this spirit, while my suggestion doesn't. > > I'd recommend that you read > https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shiny/DESCRIPTION and compare > it to citation("shiny"). Authors, but not contributors, all listed in > the citation. > > Hadley > > -- > http://had.co.nz/ >-- Gabriel Becker, PhD Computational Biologist Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Genentech, Inc. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
An example from the sos package: Its DESCRIPTION file says Author: Spencer Graves, Sundar Dorai-Raj, and Romain Francois. However, the package includes a findFn function, whose help file includes an Author(s) section, which reads, "Spencer Graves, Sundar Dorai-Raj, Romain Francois. Duncan Murdoch suggested the "???" alias for "findFn" and contributed the code for it. Special thanks to Jonathan Baron and Andy Liaw. Baron maintains the RSiteSearch data base. Liaw and Baron created the RSiteSearch function in the utils package." Another example: The "Author" of the Ecdat package is Yves Croissant <yves.croissant at let.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr>. I'm the Maintainer. At some point, I may add my name to the list of Authors but I certainly would never remove Yves' name. That package is, I think, exclusively data sets. I added functions, which I later spun off into a separate Edfun package; I'm listed as the Author and Maintainer of that. Another example that may help you: The "distr" package has several companion packages: distrDoc, distrEx, distrSim, distrTEst, distrTeach, distrMod, and distrEllipse. I haven't checked, but each package could have a separate and different list of authors. Hope this helps. Spencer On 10/7/2015 9:23 AM, Gabriel Becker wrote:> Hadley, > > With all due respect, I'm not sure what exactly your deliniation between > author and contributor is, but from what I can tell I don't agree with it. > > >From the blogpost regarding your new purrr package: > > "Purrr wouldn?t be possible without Lionel Henry > <https://github.com/lionel->. He wrote a lot of the package and his > insightful comments ..." > > And yet he is listed as a contributor in the DESCRIPTION file, and thus in > your view not worthy of being in the citation even as a non-first author? > That does not jive with what I understand to be "standard practice" with > regard to software-related publications, and it certainly isn't what I > would choose to do in that situation. > > Best, > ~G > > On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 4:59 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Adrian Du?a <dusa.adrian at unibuc.ro> wrote: >>> Hi Gabriel, >>> >>> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> [...] >>>> >>>> At the very least, this is seems to be a flagrant violation of the >>>> *spirit* of the CRAN policy, which AFAIK is intended to enforce >>>> acknowledgement of the contributions of all copyright holders in the >>>> package. The fact that you are trying to bypass the policy by suggesting >>>> users use an unofficial citation which would not comply with the policy >>>> while maintaining an official one which complies, but which you don't >> want >>>> users to see is probably a suggestion that you shouldn't do that. >>>> >>> >>> But that is the very point: I read the CRAN policies twice, and there is >> no >>> official guideline on how to compile the citation. >>> Regarding the Source packages, the policies mention: >>> >>> ###### >>> The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all >>> components of the package must be clear and unambiguous (including from >> the >>> authors specification in the DESCRIPTION file). Where code is copied (or >>> derived) from the work of others (including from R itself), care must be >>> taken that any copyright/license statements are preserved and authorship >> is >>> not misrepresented. >>> Preferably, an ?Authors at R? would be used with ?ctb? roles for the >> authors >>> of such code. Alternatively, the ?Author? field should list these authors >>> as contributors. >>> >>> Where copyrights are held by an entity other than the package authors, >> this >>> should preferably be indicated via ?cph? roles in the ?Authors at R? >> field, or >>> using a ?Copyright? field (if necessary referring to an inst/COPYRIGHTS >>> file). >>> >>> Trademarks must be respected. >>> ###### >>> >>> Now, that requirement is already met: the former author is still in the >>> authors' list. So the contribution of the former author is duly >>> acknowledged, but the fundamental issue of my question related to the >>> citation file, for which the CRAN policies doesn't offer any other >>> information. >>> >>> If the spirit of the CRAN policies is to enforce citing each and every >> one >>> of the authors, then I don't understand why the citation from package >> Rcmdr >>> meets this spirit, while my suggestion doesn't. >> I'd recommend that you read >> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shiny/DESCRIPTION and compare >> it to citation("shiny"). Authors, but not contributors, all listed in >> the citation. >> >> Hadley >> >> -- >> http://had.co.nz/ >> > >
> > I read the CRAN policies twice, and there > > is no official guideline on how to compile the citation.The policies are about copyright and IP, not credited authorship. There's overlap but they are not the same thing. You can see whether someone is a copyright holder by referring to the license you had and whether there is any of their content remaining. But that might not mean they are package 'authors'. If you reuse code verbatim from another package's function, you _must_ note the copyright - but that does not necessarily make the original author of the code a co-author of your package (though I would expect to see at least an acknowledgement in the particular function's help page). And not all 'authors' need necessarily provide code - they could, for example, have developed the core maths the code implements. Of itself, that does not confer copyright in any part of the package code or help text, but it's very likely they'd deserve credit as co-authors. Common sense would suggest to me that if you are in doubt about whether someone should be on your author list (as opposed to copyright owner list) in a package's citation, you should probably ask them. And if you are considering removing an author, you should very definitely be in doubt because there was a reason they were there. The answers you get from different contributors might be different so it would not be surprising if packages differed in the extent to which they cited contributions or added acknowledgements. In essence, though, if everybody feels fairly treated by the citations within a package, there's no reason for anyone else to complain about it, and if someone feels they have not been properly credited they can - and should - contact the maintainer and say so. So ask before removing someone from your citation. If they say 'no', don?t remove them. S Ellison ******************************************************************* This email and any attachments are confidential. Any use, copying or disclosure other than by the intended recipient is unauthorised. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately via +44(0)20 8943 7000 or notify postmaster at lgcgroup.com and delete this message and any copies from your computer and network. LGC Limited. Registered in England 2991879. Registered office: Queens Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0LY, UK
S Ellison posted: (quoting someone else, it appears)>>> I read the CRAN policies twice, and there >>> is no official guideline on how to compile the citation.And once again Dr Ellison is not attributing quotes: that is clearly covered by the posting guide. Including: Take care when you quote other people?s comments ... The original authorship and meaning should always be clear.> The policies are about copyright and IP, not credited authorship.Hmm, people keep saying things like that, but it is not correct. The right to be identified as an author is an IP right: in some jurisdictions it is called a 'moral right' (and there are others). -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK