--On Sunday, June 2, 2019 10:59 -0700 Heather Flanagan
<rse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Heather,
An observation or three (for the moment) to add you your note...
> * My preference for all RFCs that originate from a working or
> research group is that the RFCs have no more than two editors,
> and all contributors are recorded in the contributor section.
> I also recognize my preference on this one is not the
> consensus of any document stream, and I'd rather not reopen
> that battle on this particular thread. That said, I am unclear
> on what the expectation is with regards to the author list for
> a -bis document. If the original authors are retained in the
> author list, they will be requested to respond during AUTH48.
> It may be simpler to move them to contributors, and have
> someone be assigned as an editor for the -bis document.
Current stream and other preferences aside and without
particularly wanting to reopen the battle either, a very small
number of authors was Jon Postel's preference too and his
reasoning went well beyond the AUTH48 issue. First, if a
document really was multi-author, e.g., with different authors
writing or taking lead responsibility for different sections,
either someone needed to take responsibility for resolving any
inconsistencies (even if the RFC Editor helped to identify them)
or the real author (or functional, decision-making, editor)
would become the RFC Editor and he (and Joyce) wanted to avoid
that situation even when they had the needed technical expertise
to make the decisions. Second, for technical publications like
those of the RFC Series, he felt it was very important to be
sure that one person, or at most a couple of people, were
responsible as contact points for discussing the ideas,
something that is largely incompatible with having to hunt up a
whole committee and start at discussion with them (although that
one author could do that if appropriate). The latter is the
same issue that various publications who have been pressured by
their audiences to allow long lists of authors have addressed by
designating a "lead" or "corresponding" author (or,
occasionally, both).
The issue about original authors who are included being
responsible at AUTH48 has another implication too, one that Ned
Freed and I had to address explicitly with RFCs 4288 and 4289:
in spite of the act that much of the text and even more of the
theory of those two documents reflected Postel's ideas and
contributions, there was no possible way to verify whether he
would have considered the replacement documents acceptable.
When revising earlier documents, I've always taken the position
that original authors should be consulted about whether they
want to be part of the team producing the revision. If the
answer is "yes" (and they agree about what they are getting
into, including AUTH48 reviews) then they should be recognized
as authors and listed appropriately unless that would make the
author list unwieldy (for me, as for Jon, "unwieldy" starts at
four or five), in while case I've either used Contributor
sections and, when appropriate, negotiated with the RFC Editor
about including them in the AUTH48 review or have worked out
appropriate acknowledgements. If the answer is "no", then the
answer is Contributor or Acknowledgments sections as appropriate
for the particular document.
It seems to me that this is an issue of the integrity and
consistency of the RFC Series and hence something you should be
setting policy (or at least very strong and clear guidelines)
about rather than ending up negotiating outcomes on a
per-document basis. One might think per-stream would work, but
I think we've seen evidence of that not working well enough to
ensure consistency in practice. If you find that the long
author lists (whether induced by revisions of existing documents
with added authors or initial submissions that want to list
entire teams), perhaps it is time to modify the formats allow
specific designation of a lead or corresponding author.
best,
john
