IESG Statement on Internet Draft Authorship
Online:
<https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/internet-draft-authorship/>
The IESG has received complaints from IETF participants who have been listed as
document
authors or contributors without their consent ("surprised authorship").
In some cases, the surprised individuals had never seen the document that
surprised them. It
appears that some authors think that including other participants as authors or
contributors is a
way to demonstrate support for the concepts in the document and gain acceptance
for those
concepts.
Adding names of IETF participants who did not contribute to a proposal might to
some seem to
be an acceptable way of highlighting "support", but this is very clearly not an
acceptable
practice. No one should ever be added to the list of authors or contributors
on a document
unless they have consented to it and have contributed significantly to the
development of the
document.
The practice of adding surprised authors or contributors is
* not in line with the IETF culture, where it's the technical issues that
matter, not who the
authors, contributors, or supporters are;
* unethical, as it is wrong to claim support from someone who has not consented
to it;
* misleading in terms of support; and
* problematic in terms of IPR disclosures (BCPs 78 and 79).
To emphasize this last point, the person submitting an Internet-Draft asserts
that an Internet-
Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP
79. A submitter
who has not actively confirmed this with all the listed authors and
contributors cannot make that
claim, and this can cause procedural and legal problems later.
All authors need to be aware of the RFC Editor's statement on authorship,
especially related to
responsibility for the document's contents. The IESG strongly recommends that
all drafts have
explicit permission from all authors and contributors to have their names
listed before they are
submitted.
If you feel that the above issues impact you, please talk to your Area Director
or contact the
IESG by sending email to <[email protected]>. As the administrator of the I-D
repository (regardless
of the source or intended stream for the draft), the IESG will handle each case
of disputed
authorship on a case-by-case basis. All reports will be investigated, and
substantiated claims
will be met with corrective actions.
The default corrective action will be the replacement of the offending draft
with a "disputed
authorship" placeholder document. Such a document would:
* Be published as a successor to the offending draft,
* Have the offended IETF participant listed as the only author,
* State, "The author listed on this Internet-Draft has stated that they should
not have been
listed as an author on the previous version. The IETF considers being added
as an
author without one's permission as unethical. The default behaviour of the
IESG in such
cases is to approve the replacement of the offending draft with this
placeholder
document. Please direct any queries to the IESG or the author listed here."
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