Re: RFC Author Count and IPR

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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@xxxxxxx> 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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