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/
>>
>
>