[Rd] authorship and citation

[Gabriel Becker]

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 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
>
> --
> http://had.co.nz/
>



-- 
Gabriel Becker, PhD
Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Genentech, Inc.

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