[R-pkg-devel] package CatDataAnalysis

If you?re not the author of the data, you can?t submit it as such. The
website has a copyright message on it which, while not definitive, doesn?t
suggest the use you?re proposing would be allowed.

Bear in mind that you may expose CRAN not just yourself to liability if
you try to conceal true authorship.

I?d recommend asking the author of that website for permission. Either he
says that?s fine in which case you have permission, or he doesn?t and you
dodge a bullet.


On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 at 2:45 am, Charles Geyer <charlie at stat.umn.edu>
wrote:

Actually the wooldridge package does not seem to satisfy any of the
specific requests CRAN asked me for.  I have checked several other CRAN
packages for textbooks and they don't seem to satisfy those requirements
either.  So this seems to be a new idea from CRAN.

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:32 AM Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not sure exactly what cran is asking for, but the wooldridge
package is a good example of a text book data set package, so maybe
you can use the same format they did.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wooldridge/index.html

Best,

Neal

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 9:08 AM Charles Geyer <charlie at stat.umn.edu>
wrote:

I have a package that has the datasets for Categorical Data Analysis

by

Agresti that do not appear in the book.  The whole package is a github

repo

https://github.com/cjgeyer/CatDataAnalysis.  All of the data were
translated mechanically using the R script foo.R included in the repo

(but

not in the package) from Agresti's web site
http://www.stat.ufl.edu/~aa/cda/data.html.

This package seems to be a useful service to students and teachers.

The

data
are much simpler to use with this package than trying to get the data

from

Agresti's web page (foo.R has 277 lines of code).

When I submitted the package to CRAN, I got the following response.

The Description field of the DESCRIPTION file is intended to be a

(one

paragraph) description of what the package does and why it may be
useful. Please elaborate. Tell the users what the datasets are about

and

what they contain so they can use them even when they haven't read

your

book.

Please fix and resubmit, and document what was changed in the

submission

comments.

In an alternate universe without copyright law this seems a reasonable
request.  In this universe it seems to be asking for trouble.  I know

about

fair use, but I am not a lawyer and do not want to walk the borderline
between fair use and copyright violation.

The package as it is seems OK because it comes from the author's

public

web

site and these data were never in the book.

Please note that I made Alan Agresti (with his acquiescence) the

author

of

the package because it is his book and his data, but I (or rather

foo.R)

did all the work.

I replied to cran.r-project.org, but that was apparently sent to

/dev/null.

This book is IMHO the authoritative textbook on the subject.  Amazon

sales

rank agrees.  The book is used for many courses.  So this package

would

be

very helpful as is to many students and teachers.

So what to do?  Is there any way to get this package on CRAN?

--
Charles Geyer
Professor, School of Statistics
Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Minnesota
charlie at stat.umn.edu

        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

--
Charles Geyer
Professor, School of Statistics
Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Minnesota
charlie at stat.umn.edu

        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]