[Rd] authorship and citation

[Adrian Dușa]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>
wrote:

>
> [...]
>
> To clarify, legally, you can fork a standard GPL package and make any
> changes you want, including changing authors fields etc. If you don't own
> copyright for the entire work then you cannot change the license without
> consent from the other copyright holders, otherwise you have all the rights
> as anyone else granted by the license.
>
> However, CRAN policies go beyond that and say
>
> "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)."
>
> This means that CRAN will not accept a package where you did not list all
> copyright holders in one of the Author roles, although it is legal for you
> to do so outside of CRAN.
>


Please pardon my delay, I am writing from California and it's still morning
here.
I understand very well that I need to keep the previous co-author in the
list of authors, and duly acknowledge his contribution.
I would still be interested in the formal rules of compiling the citation
file (example package Rcmdr), but for the moment it can be automatically
generated via citation("QCA").

Both of these are perfectly compliant with the CRAN policies.

As another attempt to solve the matter, I wonder if any rules would be
broken if I used the .onAttach(...) function to print a message in the line
of:

> library(QCA)

Users are encouraged to cite this package as:

  Dusa, Adrian (2015). QCA: Qualitative Comparative Analysis. R Package
Version 1.2-0,
  URL: http://cran.r-project.org/package=QCA

This is just an encouragement, not a requirement, and the official citation
file meets the CRAN policies. Would that be acceptable?

Best wishes,
Adrian


-- 
Adrian Dusa
University of Bucharest
Romanian Social Data Archive
Soseaua Panduri nr.90
050663 Bucharest sector 5
Romania

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