Contributions clarification

[sscivier]

Issue raised as part of the JOSS review: openjournals/joss-reviews#9408.

One of the items on my review checklist is

Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@pabloitu) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?

For the first question, I am happy to answer yes. However, there appear to be some inconsistencies between the authors of the paper and the contributors to the floatCSEP package. Based on the information I could find, it was also not clear to me what are the contributions of each author. There is a CREDITS.md document in the repository--which is a good start, but it does not appear complete.

Specifics I have noticed:

• One contributor to floatCSEP code does not appear as an author on the paper.
• A number of authors on the paper do not appear as contributors to the code (in commit history); though non-code contributions can be sufficient for co-authorship. Some of these authors appear in CREDITS.md, but their contributions are not described.
• A number of authors on the paper do not appear in CREDITS.md.

In case I have missed something--is there somewhere in the paper / code / documentation where contributions and authorship are described?

If not, I would suggest the following:

• Ensure consistency between CREDITS.md, contributors to floatCSEP, and paper authors.
• Somewhere in the paper / code / documentation (likely CREDITS.md), briefly describe the contributions of all paper authors to the paper and/or the code.
• Following JOSS authorship guidelines (https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/submitting.html#authorship), ensure that contributions are appropriately acknowledged / described--whether through co-authorship or acknowledgements in the paper.

These recommendations aim to help the authors meet JOSS authorship guidance; I’m happy for the authors to address them in whichever manner they consider best.

[pabloitu]

@sscivier Thank you for raising this issue. You are right, contributions are not specified exhaustively. I've created a new PR (#91 ) with an updtaed CREDITS.md, which has the updated information. Perhaps I'd like to ask (also maybe to @andreww) if given that this info would be contained within the repo, is it still necessary to place it in the manuscript.

Regarding the missing contributor (who collaborated with code 3 years ago when the software was rudimentary and aiming elsewhere), I'm happy to ask him if he'd like to be included in the co-authorship (given I have permission to include him mid-review). If possible @andreww could also inform us about whether this is possible.

[andreww]

From my point of view, that new CREDITS.md file looks good. I don't think you need to reproduce the information in the paper, but maybe mention that this exists (e.g. "details of author contributions can be found in "CREDITS.md" in the code repository" as part of the acknowledgments or similar).

Adding an author at this stage shouldn't be a problem. The other option would be to add a note to the CREDITS file says something like "floatcsep is described in a manuscript submitted to JOSS and the authors of that manuscript were the active developers at the time of submission" (or whatever criteria you used). Whichever makes most sense I guess.

[pabloitu]

Thank you @andreww and @sscivier. I contacted our previous collaborator (Asim Khawaja) and he does not wish to be part of the submission, because of the long time it has passed since his contributions. All the suggested changes from this issue were included in both the repository (#93) and the manuscript (#94).

[sscivier]

@pabloitu -- Thanks for addressing this so thoroughly. I'll be happy to tick off that item on my review checklist once the two PRs (#93 and #94) are merged.