[Rd] vignettes and papers

[Achim Zeileis]

Robin:

> Lots of my packages have been the subject of
> journal articles either in JSS or Rnews or (in one
> case) elsewhere.
>
> I would like to add these articles
> to my packages as vignettes.
>
> Reproducing the papers exactly requires a number
> of files [such as style files or PDFs] to be included in
>   the inst/doc directory to pass R CMD check.
>
> A vanilla .Rnw file seems to be a good idea,
> but loses some of the nice JSS typesetting.
>
> What is Best Practice here?
>
> And are there ethical or other issues that I should
> be aware of  before including copies of Rnews
> or JSS papers verbatim in an R package?

There are two separate issues here:
  1. Using jss.cls
     This is ok, as long as the vignette is completely
     identical with the published paper. But as some details of a
     vignette might be modified/extended/corrected/enhanced, I typically
     remove the JSS header and instead include a comment like
        A previous version to this introduction to the
        R package zoo has been published as Zeileis
        and Grothendieck (2005) in the Journal of Statistical
        Software.
     in the vignette. See
       vignette("zoo", package = "zoo")
     If you want a .cls file that provides the same commands as jss.cls
     but without the JSS header and footer, see Z.cls at
       http://statmath.wu-wien.ac.at/~zeileis/tex/
  2. Including style files in the package
     Checking whether the LaTeX sources can be compiled wasn't done
     until recently and now leads to a notification. Because I'm using
     the same infrastructure (typically Z.cls) in all of my packages,
     I don't want to maintain them in each of my packages additionally
     and currently don't supply them within the R package. My personal
     opinion is that this is not so much of a problem because people
     want to work with the R code and not the LaTeX code...but, obviously,
     there is some tension in this. Just my EUR 0.02.

hth,
Z