Sort out how we acknowledge contributors in citations and elsewhere
Opened this issue · 3 comments
The SDS is a bit fuzzy about how publishers, creators, authors, editors, etc. should be acknowledged. The relevant sections are in Section 3.1 (3.1.3 Publisher and 3.1.6 Preferred citation), Section 3.2 (3.2.3.1 Contributors, Creator, and Bibliographic citation), Section 4.2 (4.2.1 Publisher and 4.2.2 Contributor, Creator, and Bibliographic Citation).
The process of actually trying to generate this information for all of the standards has clarified this a bit in my mind. Section 3.1.3 states that TDWG is the publisher of all standards. This may seem problematic for old standards where the adopted documents were written by someone outside of TDWG, but it makes sense if we consider the standards and the documents they contain as separate entities. TDWG publishes the standard but may or may not publish contained documents. Given this view, citations of standards should always give TDWG (or its precursor names) as the publisher, while citations of documents should list the actual document publisher.
The "author" of a standard is murkier. Because complex standards like Darwin Core may be composed of multiple parts, each of which has a different set of contributors, it's problematic to assign individuals as authors of the standard. The SDS is silent on this, but it makes sense to me that the author of a modern standard should be the task group that created it. That works back to a point, but in the earliest standards, I have no idea whether task groups even existed or not. So in citations for recent standards, I listed the task group in the author position of the citation, and in older standards I sometimes one or more individual people.
For authors of documents, it's a bit clearer, but still murky in some cases. For example, Floristic Regions of the World was written by Takhtajan and he's listed as the author in the citation. But it was edited by Cronquist and translated by Crovello - both important contributions. So all three are listed as Contributors (with their roles) but I only listed Takhtajan in the author position. Is that a mistake? What about HISPID3 whose authorship is a mess?
I think that the contributors lists are pretty good, but it would be good of one or more people would go through the citations for both the documents (in this table) and the standards (in this table), compare them with the contributor lists on the corresponding standards landing page, and make sure that they are consistent in style and format.
The other thing that needs to be hashed out is how to recognize review managers. That is a huge job that has not previously been acknowledged in any kind of citations. I now include it in the contributors list (when I know who it was), but there isn't any consistent listing in any citation. In theory, the review manager's contribution is to the standard itself, and not necessarily individual documents. For example, Gail Kampmeier managed the initial review of DwC, but had no role with the DwC RDF Guide. So on the DwC landing page, she's listed under each of the documents where she had a role. On the existing AC landing page I'm listed in the citation for the standard, but I'm not sure that is right and I took my name off the citation in the script-generated page. So where does the review manager get acknowledged?
It is not critical that this be completely right before actually using the generated pages, but at some point we should get it right and have a policy for how people get acknowledged in future standards. Perhaps an in-person meeting of a small group of people at the TDWG meeting would be the best way to sort this out.
The roles of all contributors to TDWG documents are listed here. Those roles were used to create the entries for documents on the standards landing pages (see for example https://www.tdwg.org/standards/floristic-regions/), where the editor and translator are credited. However, this is still at odds the current practice in citations, which lists the creating task group or interest group in the author position of the citation. See for example the documents at https://www.tdwg.org/standards/dwc/ where the citations don't say anything about which people actually did the work.
I think that in the case of citing the standards themselves, the current practice, which is to give the task group in the author position, with the review manager acknowledged in parentheses, is probably OK. But I think we need to rethink the citations for the documents within the standard, since they give basically no recognition for the actual people who did the work.
@dshorthouse, @qgroom, @emhaston, has the Attribution IG discussed this? Can you give an opinion on how to fix this?
There's been no concrete discussion on this within the Attribution IG, though it does cut to the heart of what we mean by attribution vs citation. The latter has style guides for print & display whereas the former does not, or at least, not widely implemented. The one that's gaining the most traction that affords more granularity in contributor roles than plainly (or incompletely) expressed in a citation is CRediT, https://casrai.org/credit/ whose JATS XML can be found at https://jats4r.org/credit-taxonomy.