Subject: [OSPF] FW: IESG Statement on Internet Draft Authorship

From: "Acee Lindem (acee)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2015 19:39:21 +0000

All, 
We haven’t had any problems with this in the OSPF WG but I’ll repost
never-the-less. 
Thanks,
Acee 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: IETF-Announce [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
>The IESG
>Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 2:32 PM
>To: IETF Announcement List
>Subject: IESG Statement on Internet Draft Authorship
>
>The IESG has received some reports of IETF participants having been
>listed as document authors on drafts without their consent ("surprised
>authorship"). In some cases, the surprised authors had never seen the
>draft that surprised them. It appears that some draft authors think that
>including other participants as authors is a way to show support for the
>concepts in the document and gain acceptance for those concepts. This
>may be thought of as especially useful if the additional authors are
>established IETF participants.
>
>Adding names of IETF participants who did not actually work on a
>proposal might seem to be a low-risk way of demonstrating "support", but
>this is very clearly not an acceptable practice: no one should ever be
>added to the list of authors on a draft unless that person has consented
>to it and has contributed significantly to the development of the draft.
>
>The practice of adding surprised authors is
>
>  - not in line with the IETF culture, where it's the technical issues
>    that matter, not who the authors or supporters are;
>  - unethical, as it is wrong to claim support from someone who has not
>    consented to it;
>  - misleading in terms of support; and
>  - problematic in terms of IPR disclosures (BCPs 78 and 79).
>
>To emphasize this last point, the person submitting an Internet-Draft is
>asserting that "This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance
>with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79". A submitter who has not
>discussed this with all the listed authors cannot make that claim, and
>this can cause procedural and legal problems later.
>
>All authors need to be aware of the ​RFC Editor's statement on
>authorship [1], especially as it relates to responsibility for the
>document's contents. The IESG strongly recommends that all drafts have
>explicit permission from all authors to have their names listed before
>the draft is submitted.
>
>If you feel that you are impacted by the above issues, please talk to
>your Area Director or contact the IESG by ​sending email to
><[email-masked]>. As the administrator of the I-D repository (regardless
>of the source or intended stream for the draft), the IESG will handle
>each case of disputed authorship on a case-by-base basis. All reports
>will be investigated, and substantiated claims will be met with
>corrective actions.
>
>The default corrective action will be the replacement of the offending
>draft with a "disputed authorship" tombstone. Such a tombstone would:
>
>  - Be published as a successor to the offending draft,
>  - Have the offended IETF participant listed as the only author,
>  - Will state "The author listed on this tombstone Internet-Draft has
>    stated that he/she should not have been listed as an author on the
>    previous version. The IETF considers being added as an author
>    without one's permission as unethical. The default behaviour of the
>    IESG in such cases is to approve replacement of the offending draft
>    with this tombstone. Please direct any queries to the author listed
>    here." 
>
>[1] http://www.rfc-editor.org/pipermail/rfc-interest/2015-May/008869.html
>