[Rd] authorship and citation

[Hadley Wickham]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Adrian Dușa <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

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