From murdoch.duncan at gmail.com  Wed Oct  7 21:39:51 2015
From: murdoch.duncan at gmail.com (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2015 15:39:51 -0400
Subject: [Rd] authorship and citation
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On 07/10/2015 1:39 PM, Tim Keitt wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com
>> wrote:
> 
>> Another example:  The "Author" of the Ecdat package is Yves Croissant <
>> yves.croissant at 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.
>>
> 
> This reminded me of something I have always found curious about roles
> listed in the DESCRIPTION file. Since there is no "maintainer" role in this
> list: http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html, which was used to get
> the role names, you will be listed as the "creator" of the package when you
> list yourself as maintainer even if you did not initiate the package or
> even contribute code.
> 

I think it was easier to (ab)use that role than to get a "Maintainer"
role added to the standard ones.  The description of "creator" is

"A person or organization responsible for the intellectual or artistic
content of a resource"

The usual English meaning of "creator" would be close to

"A person or organization originally responsible for the intellectual or
artistic content of a resource"

R's use of it is close to

"A person or organization currently responsible for the intellectual or
artistic content of a resource"

Duncan Murdoch



[Rd] authorship and citation
Duncan Murdoch