Proposals:UnpublishedWorkMacro

How to manage credits for Unpublished Work

Motivation

Given that ITK is providing a vehicle for disseminating advanced algorithms it is getting more and more common that new code in ITK corresponds to work that has not been published yet. In order to protect the credits of the authors who kindly shared their code in ITK we propose to add a Macro that will warn users when a new algorithm is unpublished work and should not be used by second parties for publication without giving proper credit to the original authors.

Proposed Solution

A first proposed option is to create a new

 itkUnpublishedWorkMacro()

to be added to the constructor of classes related to unpublished work.

This macro will print out to the standard output the name of the author, institution and a warning describing the fact that this code is being shared with the intention of fostering the rapid advance of the field and that users should avoid to use these algorithms for publication without first contacting the original authors.

The Macro should include the following items:

• Author's name
• email contact (in anti-spam format)
• Institution
• Date
• Filename
• Classname

The last two are important because once the message appears in the console at run time, it would be difficult to locate the "unpublished" work if no filename or classname information is provided.