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(_at_)mit(_dot_)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
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