| Network Working Group | B. Carpenter |
| Internet-Draft | Univ. of Auckland |
| Intended status: Informational | May 30, 2015 |
| Expires: December 1, 2015 |
What is an Author of an IETF Stream Draft?
draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-01
This draft suggests guidelines for assigning authorship in IETF stream Internet-Drafts. It also discusses the related issues of acknowledgements, editors and contributors.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on December 1, 2015.
Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
The question sometimes comes up of who should be listed as the author(s) of a draft, who should be listed as editors or contributors, and what acknowledgements are appropriate. The guidelines below are aimed at Internet-Drafts in the IETF publication stream [RFC5741]. Any inconsistency with [RFC7221] is unintentional, and related issues are discussed in [I-D.crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines]. The guidelines are intended to be compatible with the RFC Editor's style guide [RFC7322], with the RFC Editor's authorship policies <http://www.rfc-editor.org/pipermail/rfc-interest/2015-May/008869.html> and with the (draft) IESG statement on "surprised" authors <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/iesg/trac/wiki/SurprisedAuthors>.
This draft has been written purely to aid discussion and is not expected to be published as an RFC.
Authors are people who have made a substantial creative contribution to the document. Normally this means writing text or drawing diagrams. Occasionally, with the consent of the other authors, it means making some other substantial creative contribution to the document, for example by writing a software implementation as part of the design process. It's a matter of judgement whether a person who simply makes a key intellectual contribution should rank as an author.
People who did not make any such substantial contribution should not be listed as authors. Funding support, managerial or supervisory status, and CV embellishment don't count.
In normal circumstances, people should not be listed as authors without their explicit permission.
The practical impact is that the authors will be listed as such on the front page if the document becomes an RFC, and in public bibliographies.
Contributors are people who made smaller creative contributions to the document than the authors, for example providing initial ideas that others have transformed into publishable text, or drafting only a few paragraphs.
People who did not make any such contribution should not be listed as contributors. People should not normally be listed as contributors without their explicit permission.
The dividing line between contributors and authors is a matter of judgement and cannot be rigidly defined. However, the RFC Editor's policy is to query any document that has more than five listed authors. Any list of more than five authors will need to be negotiated if the document is approved for publication as an RFC.
When a document has a large number of contributors and potential authors, it may be appropriate to designate one or two people as both "Authors" and "Editors" and list the others as contributors. The editors will indeed do the actual work of editing the document on behalf of the community. The practical impact of this is that the editors will be listed as such on the front page if the document becomes an RFC, and in public bibliographies.
In some cases, it may be appropriate to retain a list of authors of which one or two are designated as editors. What matters is "truth in advertising": the people involved should all feel happy that the designations of editors, authors and contributors are fair and accurate.
It's worth noting that in some people's opinion, once a draft has been adopted by a WG, all future changes are performed as an editing action on behalf of the WG. Traditionally, the IETF has chosen to retain the word "Author" in most cases, with the formal designation of editors being exceptional.
Acknowledgements should be given to people who have made significant creative contributions smaller than those from the authors and contributors, or to people who have made useful comments, provided critical reviews, or otherwise contributed significantly to the development of the document. If ideas have been adopted from other written sources, including IETF documents, clearly a reference is an ethical requirement, but an acknowledgement might also be appropriate.
Acknowledgements may also be given to people or organizations that have given material support and assistance, but this should not include the authors' regular employers.
An acknowledgement does not signify that the person acknowledged agrees with the document. In general, people who do not wish to be listed as an author or a contributor, but have in fact made a significant contribution, should be given an acknowledgement.
It goes without saying that normally nobody should be listed as an author, contributor or editor against their will. Ideally, the parties involved will agree among themselves, or defer to the judgement of the WG Chairs or Area Directors. Practice may vary between WGs. However, we need flexibility to deal with unusual cases, such as these:
None of the above directly affects intellectual property rights. However, it's worth noting that if a draft includes complete acknowledgements and references, it will be much simpler to identify its status as possible prior art.
Copyright in IETF documents is governed by BCP 78 [RFC5378] and its predecessors, the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions, and applicable national and international law.
The word "contributor" used in this draft might not mean the same thing as the word "Contributor" used in BCP 79 [RFC3979]. That BCP should be consulted by anyone concerned about the IETF requirement for disclosure of intellectual property rights.
None, really.
This memo includes no request to IANA.
Valuable comments were received from Loa Andersson, Andy Bierman, Carsten Bormann, Dave Crocker, Tom Petch, Yaron Sheffer, and Joe Touch.
draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-01, 2015-05-30: incorporating community comments, citing RFC Editor and IESG statements.
draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-00, 2015-04-24: original version.
| [I-D.crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines] | dcrocker, d. and R. Droms, "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures", Internet-Draft draft-crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines-00, March 2015. |
| [RFC3979] | Bradner, S., "Intellectual Property Rights in IETF Technology", BCP 79, RFC 3979, March 2005. |
| [RFC5378] | Bradner, S. and J. Contreras, "Rights Contributors Provide to the IETF Trust", BCP 78, RFC 5378, November 2008. |
| [RFC5741] | Daigle, L., Kolkman, O. and IAB, "RFC Streams, Headers, and Boilerplates", RFC 5741, December 2009. |
| [RFC7221] | Farrel, A. and D. Crocker, "Handling of Internet-Drafts by IETF Working Groups", RFC 7221, April 2014. |
| [RFC7322] | Flanagan, H. and S. Ginoza, "RFC Style Guide", RFC 7322, September 2014. |