Concerns for Authorship and Contributions

[xiazeyu]

To ensure all contributors are credited in accordance with JOSS's authorship guidelines, I have a couple of questions based on my review of the repository's commit history:

• Primary Contributor(s): I noticed that a significant portion of the commits are attributed to the GitHub account 'forefire'. Could you please clarify if this is an organizational or shared account? If so, it would be helpful to identify the individual developers behind these contributions to ensure they are properly credited for their substantial work.

• Additional Contributions: I also observed some early commits from a user named ludobegins (Ludovic Beghin), though their contributions appear to have been removed later in the project's history. Since this individual is not listed in the author list or in the acknowledgements, could you please provide some context on his role? This will help clarify whether an authorship credit or formal acknowledgement is warranted.

Parent issue: openjournals/joss-reviews#8680

[filippi]

Hi @xiazeyu thanks for reviewing and your question,
I (@filippi) am the dev behind the forefire account, used for most of the pushes except from the 2014 initial commit(an import from SVN), to check, it is the "organisation" account of the forefireAPI organisation, for which filippi is the owner. I changed local repos quite often (do not really check how I set it up - which pgp key is used), and I have to say that early or even now mastership of git and GitHub is/was pretty low, I actually realized when I submitted the JOSS paper, originally as @forefire too.

It is not possible to clean-up the commits history, re-affecting names and accounts, so I understand it is quite confusing.
Some close contributors (Federic Bosseur) contributed many by testing and running the code or preferred to send me their codes by email (Albert Alonso-Pinar) as is my PhD student, and did not have good git proficiency last year.

if you look at the list/number of commits count (generated by the CI-Bot here in the paper issue you may have a better overview of the actual names, as they are based on the "git name".. but here too, a bit confusing, here is some help :

257 antonio-leblanc == Main dev in Brazil/umgroumeiu, rather recent, most of the documentation, readme's and Bots, @ludobegins works with him and they shared the same local repo, so he did push under @ludobegins for some time,
148 FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste == @filippi > main dev/owner
84 CI BOT
48 Jean-Baptiste Filippi == FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste
31 ludobegins == works with Antonio
26 Batti Filippi == FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste
11 filippi_j == FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste
6 Frederic Allaire
6 Thoreau Romain
5 filippi == FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste
5 ronan == Ronan Paugam
5 th96r4ss
4 Ronan == Ronan Paugam
3 Ludovic Beghin == @ludobegins
3 baggiocolpir == Roberta Baggio
3 jdurand
2 Antonio Leblanc == antonio-leblanc
2 Damien Grandi
2 Dominik Laux
2 ronan paugam == Ronan Paugam
1 BAGGIO_R == baggiocolpir
1 Jean-Baptiste FILIPPI. == FILIPPI Jean-Baptiste
1 Johanna Strebl
1 damien
1 dependabot[bot]
1 rbaggio == Roberta Baggio
1 serbal193

thanks a lot
Jean-Baptiste

[xiazeyu]

Hello filippi

Thanks for explaining this. I understand it’s a historic problem that makes the contribution confused. Having a good commit practice will be helpful sometimes when people need to trace back who wrote the code to decide who to make contact with. This will be especially useful when your project is growing and more contributors come in to help.

Saying that, your answer solved my concern. I think there's no issue in authorship and contribution.

Thank you