On 22/04/2015 03:08, John Levine wrote:
> In article <D96D1B26-7782-4E36-9A1A-3BD94607B176@xxxxxxxxx> you write:
>>> Be nice if the posting tool confirmed co-author(s) whenever a co-author(s) is "new" (all
>> would be new for -00). This would require keeping a database of the drafts and co-authors.
>
> It already knows who the authors are -- if a new version of a draft
> has an added author, one of the previous authors has to confirm it.
>
> It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require that each author
> confirm at least once that he or she wants to be an author of a draft,
> which means all of the authors on -00 and any added authors on
> subsequent versions. The issues about cutoffs can be finessed by
> merely leaving off (or commenting out in the XML) the names of authors
> who won't be able to confirm and adding them in a later version. If
> you want to put in a note like [[ Joe Blow to be listed as co-author
> in future versions ]] that's fine.
>
> This should both be a small change to the software and a small change
> to the way we work.
It would also be a small degradation in our social contract: we can't
trust each other enough to trust that the listed authors are, in fact,
the authors. I think it's abominable that some people violate ethics
in this way, but I *strongly* object to solving this with tooling
that adds inertia to the normal case.
(I've been fortunate in that nobody has ever added me as an I-D author
without my knowledge, but it has happened to me in academic publishing,
and it made me mad as hell and I had the paper withdrawn. So I do
sympathise with the problem. Just not with the proposed solution.)
Regards
Brian