Publications:Warning to add in code for unpublised work

Warning to add to Unpublished Work

Motivation

The Extreme Programming aproach followed in NAMIC makes possible to share code of advanced algorithms at very early stages, even while the algorithms are under development. This high speed development cycle combined with the deficiencies of the the current publishing system, where publications may take excesively long times ranging from six months to two years, leads more and more often to the situation where code is available for algorithms that have not been published.

In order to protect the credits of the original authors who in good faith shared their unpublished work, NAMIC developers have agreed on the following conventions for managing code from unpublished work.

First: Inform Users

These guidelines are stablished under the given that all the participants in this process are acting in good faith. It is clear that the guidelines descrived here are not appropriate for protecting researches from unethical or unfairly abusive use of their code by third parties. Under this assumption, our first consideration is to make sure that users of the code are aware of the "unpublished" status of the code they are looking at.

Documentation

The documentation of the code should include a warning that clearly states that the code in that source file corresponds to unpublished work. This should be done using the Doxygen keywords:

  "\author"

and

  "\warning"

The message should include at least

• Author name
• Email contact (In anti-spam format)
• Insitution
• Date

Run time message

Since users may not look at the source code, there is a risk of inadvertedly using unpublished algorithms for work that the user plan to publish themselves. It is therefore necesary to add a run-time message that will clearly indicate the "unpublished" status of the work. Current proposal is to add a UnpublishedWorkMacro() to ITK, that authors could put in the constructors of their classes in order to send a message to the standar output. The message should contain the same information as above plus a filename and classname. These last two are necessary because otherwise the user will not know which one of the many files in his software project are sending this message to the standard output. The full list will be:

• Author name
• Email contact (In anti-spam format)
• Insitution
• Date
• Filename
• Classname (when appropriate)

In this way, users of the code will always be informed of the "unpublished" status of the work and will be able to follow the guidelines on how to use that work for their own research and eventually for their own publications by givin appropriate credits to the original authors.

http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Proposals:UnpublishedWorkMacro

Users: Contact authors

Once a user has been notified of the "unpublished" status of a particular piece of code. It should contact the authors before attempting to publish work of their own that uses the unpublished work.