contributed-code

[James Darrell McCauley]

Helena Mitasova (helena at ginko.cecer.army.mil) writes on 23 Jan 95:
>Bill Baker writes:
>
>>There is a request in one of the README files that if the code is used
>>that a published article we wrote about the programs be cited. 

>>Do any code contributors have thoughts about how we can achieve some
>>of the minor rewards of developing and contributing code (i.e., it
>>gets used), while still having a little protection against use without
>>citation?  Maybe this is only important to those of us in academia
>>and elsewhere where citation is a measure of our value.  Perhaps 
>>I'm the only one concerned about this...

>Bill, you are not the only one and we share your concern. 
>Because GRASS is still a public domain software, very little
>can be done to protect its contributions.
>To continue our research work in a direction which can produce
>contributions to GRASS we need to prove that our contributions
>are used, important and have impact in the scientific comunity.
>The best way how to prove this is to present a list of citations
>from scientific papers where the contributed program was used.
>Reference to GRASS is not recognized as a sufficient proof as it is 
>too general.

dittos here. Perhaps some sort of statement should be made in a
README file or the manual of future releases asking folks to give
credit where credit is due. E.g., give an example citation:
  H. Mitasova, L. Mitas, I. Kosinovsky, and D. Gerdes. 1993.
    s.surf.tps: spline interpolation with tension. In: GRASS
    4.1 Reference Manual. M. Shapiro, J. Westervelt, D. Gerdes,
    M. Larson, K. Brownfield, eds. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 
    Construction Engineering Research Laboratories: Champaign, IL.
and maybe ask authors to send reprints or at least email to
original contributors. I am making it a practice to cite
GRASS software this way. Helena - the preprint is in the mail :)

Many of us who contribute code could care less about financial
compensation [hence we contribute], but as a matter of professional
courtesy, it would be nice to know when/where things are useful.
Noone likes to feel unappreciated (sob sob ;-) but for some it's a
matter of survival ("justifying your existence").

We need some good bird dogs! Annecdote: recently someone asked me
about an article that appeared in some publication called "Personal
Engineering" - come to find out, it referenced a posting of mine to
sci.stat.consult about the libraries behind s.normal (a program for
testing normality). I had no idea that this was written.  This is not
the first instance (it's always a surprise to find your name listed in
the index of books, especially with respect to public domain
software). Moral of the story: if you see a reference made to a
particular GRASS program, let the contributor know. Maybe they
already know about the reference, but chances are they don't.

--Darrell
James Darrell McCauley, USDA National Needs Fellow
Agric Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1146, USA
mccauley at ecn.purdue.edu    +++   http://soils.ecn.purdue.edu/~mccauley/