[Techspec] Re: RFC Author Count and IPR

Authorship discussions have a long history in the sciences. I'm not 
aware of any other scientific or technical publication that limits the 
number of authors. (Indeed, I have had to extend the maximum author 
count on a largish conference management system I run [edas.info] a few 
times.) 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.

My understanding is that "contributors" generally have inferior rights, 
not much different from those individuals acknowledged in the 
acknowledgment section of technical papers and RFCs.

After some of the recent science scandals, there also seems to be a 
movement afoot (e.g., for Science and Nature) to force all authors to 
take responsibility for the paper and its content. That's a flip-side, 
also from an IPR perspective: If somebody can plausibly claim that they 
just got added to the author list without their consent, they could 
weasle out of the IPR disclosure rules. At least from my experience, it 
is not uncommon that I-D authors add others as a courtesy and, 
currently, nobody seems to check whether these authors consented to 
being an author...

Henning

Vijay Devarapallli wrote:
> On 5/24/06, Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> That means if you have unlisted authors who have contributed
>> significant chunks of text, you still need to get their clearance to
>> do anything interesting with that text.
> 
> typically the unlisted authors are ignored.
> 
> also during the AUTH48 period, the RFC Editor contacts only the listed 
> authors.
> 
> Vijay
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> Ietf@ietf.org
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

_______________________________________________
Techspec mailing list
Techspec@ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/techspec