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.croiss...@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.wick...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Adrian Dușa <dusa.adr...@unibuc.ro> wrote:
Hi Gabriel,
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbec...@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@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@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/
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