Hi all -
I am pushing my idealstan package to CRAN, and got this email from a CRAN reviewer about adding “The Trustees of Columbia University” as an author/copyright holder to the package description:
We are missing
Copyright (C) 2015, 2016 Trustees of Columbia Universityin the authors list.
Please add all authors and copyright holders in the Authors@R field with the appropriate roles.
From the CRAN policies you agreed to:
"The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all components of the package must be clear and unambiguous (including from the authors specification in the DESCRIPTION file). Where code is copied (or derived) from the work of others (including from R itself), care must be taken that any copyright/license statements are preserved and authorship is not misrepresented.
Preferably, an ‘Authors@R’ would be used with ‘ctb’ roles for the authors of such code. Alternatively, the ‘Author’ field should list these authors as contributors.
Where copyrights are held by an entity other than the package authors, this should preferably be indicated via ‘cph’ roles in the ‘Authors@R’ field, or using a ‘Copyright’ field (if necessary referring to an inst/COPYRIGHTS file)."
I looked at brms and edstan, and neither list Columbia (or the Stan team) in the author field. I am fine doing this, but a bit mystified as to exactly what I should write in the Copyright field - if Stan is BSD/GPL, doesn’t that mean I don’t need to include the copyright as long as my package is also GPL?
If I do need to include authors from Stan, should I just list the Stan Development Team and leave it at that?
Any help much appreciated.