Subject: RE: Authors and Editors (was Re: RFC Author Count and IPR)

From: "Burger, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:18:42 -0400

This is exactly what we do in lemonade.  We have 1-3 editors, with the
possibility of the "cast of thousands" authors (contributors).

I would challenge you to find five document that were WRITTEN by more
than 3 editors.  I offer five, because I am sure that out of ~5000
RFC's, it is statistically likely that a handful DO have more than 3
editors.  However, I would offer that is the corner case, not the normal
case.

I would like to go further.  We are the IETF.  We are not Nature,
Science, or even IEEE Transactions on Networking.  Moreover, we are not
writing patents.  In the academic publication world, if I contribute the
smallest idea, I can reasonably expect my name to be on the authors
list, even if only near the end.  Likewise, if I have one claim on a
patent I can identify as mine, then my name goes on the patent as an
inventor.  However, the purpose of the IETF is not to publish academic
documents.  I assert that we work collaboratively to produce protocols,
edited by a small handful of editors.

Yes, we should acknowledge the editor's role.  Yes, in the name of
intellectual integrity, we must acknowledge contributors to the
protocol.  However, no, we do NOT need to put contributors on the title
page.

On the IPR thing: if the Note Well doesn't cover us, we are screwed
anyway.

All IMHO.

-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Dawkins [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 3:43 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Authors and Editors (was Re: RFC Author Count and IPR)

Dropping techspec and ipr-wg from this part of the thread

> The current limit of 5 seems to be motivated by formatting constraints
and 
> maybe by the notion that "vanity" publishing should be prevented. It
is 
> not clear to me that these motivations have legal standing and 
> essentially, for practical purposes, force authors to give up their 
> rights. In the past, I know that for some drafts, this limit has been 
> extended when the AD made the right noises to the RFC editor, so it is
not 
> universally observed.

People can tell me that I've been misleading WG chairs and editors, but
what 
I've been saying in the WG Leadership tutorial is that the 5-author
limit 
resulted from

- the practice of contacting authors at AUTH48, only to find out that
more 
authors increase the likelihood of job changes and/or e-mail bounces,
plus

- several "dog-pile" author lists on drafts with a huge number of
authors, 
leading us to suspect that this was an effort to demonstrate "support"
from 
a large group of vendors ("so this should be a WG draft and WGLCed 
immediately"), plus

- text formatting software that "broke" when the author list wouldn't
fit on 
one page because there were so many authors.

I hear Russ's concern about tracking IPR sources, but hope this doesn't
get 
conflated with author/editor tracking.

I'm the draft editor for the Softwires problem statement, which would
have 
seven authors (including me), except that we're trying to observe the 
five-author guideline. Since this causes some heartburn, what I've been 
thinking about proposing was

- if you have individual authors, you do both the front page and the
author 
section as we do them today

- if you have an editor, you list the editor on the front page, but not
the 
authors, and you list both editors and authors listed in the author
section 
(as we do today)

But I'm still thinking...

Thanks,

Spencer 

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