The IESG has received some reports of IETF participants having been
listed as document authors on drafts without their consent ("surprised
authorship"). In some cases, the surprised authors had never seen the
draft that surprised them. It appears that some draft authors think that
including other participants as authors is a way to show support for the
concepts in the document and gain acceptance for those concepts. This
may be thought of as especially useful if the additional authors are
established IETF participants.
Adding names of IETF participants who did not actually work on a
proposal might seem to be a low-risk way of demonstrating "support", but
this is very clearly not an acceptable practice: no one should ever be
added to the list of authors on a draft unless that person has consented
to it and has contributed significantly to the development of the draft.
The practice of adding surprised authors is
- not in line with the IETF culture, where it's the technical issues
that matter, not who the authors or supporters are;
- unethical, as it is wrong to claim support from someone who has not
consented to it;
- misleading in terms of support; and
- problematic in terms of IPR disclosures (BCPs 78 and 79).
To emphasize this last point, the person submitting an Internet-Draft is
asserting that "This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance
with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79". A submitter who has not
discussed this with all the listed authors cannot make that claim, and
this can cause procedural and legal problems later.
All authors need to be aware of the RFC Editor's statement on
authorship [1], especially as it relates to responsibility for the
document's contents. The IESG strongly recommends that all drafts have
explicit permission from all authors to have their names listed before
the draft is submitted.
If you feel that you are impacted by the above issues, please talk to
your Area Director or contact the IESG by sending email to
<iesg@ietf.org>. As the administrator of the I-D repository (regardless
of the source or intended stream for the draft), the IESG will handle
each case of disputed authorship on a case-by-base basis. All reports
will be investigated, and substantiated claims will be met with
corrective actions.
The default corrective action will be the replacement of the offending
draft with a "disputed authorship" tombstone. Such a tombstone would:
- Be published as a successor to the offending draft,
- Have the offended IETF participant listed as the only author,
- Will state "The author listed on this tombstone Internet-Draft has
stated that he/she should not have been listed as an author on the
previous version. The IETF considers being added as an author
without one's permission as unethical. The default behaviour of the
IESG in such cases is to approve replacement of the offending draft
with this tombstone. Please direct any queries to the author listed
here."
[1] http://www.rfc-editor.org/pipermail/rfc-interest/2015-May/008869.html
