authorship and citation

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com

wrote:

Another example:  The "Author" of the Ecdat package is Yves Croissant <
yves.croissant at let.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr>.  I'm the Maintainer.  At some
point, I may add my name to the list of Authors but I certainly would never
remove Yves' name.  That package is, I think, exclusively data sets.  I
added functions, which I later spun off into a separate Edfun package;  I'm
listed as the Author and Maintainer of that.

This reminded me of something I have always found curious about roles
listed in the DESCRIPTION file. Since there is no "maintainer" role in this
list: http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html, which was used to get
the role names, you will be listed as the "creator" of the package when you
list yourself as maintainer even if you did not initiate the package or
even contribute code.

THK

http://www.keittlab.org/