Topic idea - Research Software Authorship

[DaniBodor]

I would like to propose this topic idea for a soft skills SIG.

My idea would be to discuss who should be part of the author list of a software package (cff file).
Potential options are:

• everyone who contributed to the code
• only "main contributors"/maintainers
  • can we more or less define a rough cutoff? in LoC, %, time spent?
• LAs/advisors/project managers, etc, who did not actively contribute to the code base, etc.
  • also here, what would the contribution have to be?

I would be happy to volunteer to present what more or less the consensus/common policies are regarding authorship for research papers, which may be a nice starting point to discuss what authorship of research software could be. I would introduce this max 10-15 mins, with the idea to mainly discuss/brainstorm the subject en groupe.

Ultimately, I would like to come up with a formal eSC policy for this. This would give us a fall back in case of disagreements or difficulties with partners. Also, if we are happy with our consensus, we could feed this back to the CFF repo, as they also do not give any advice on what software authorship should/could entail, while I think it would be nice if they also provided guidelines.