Yes, The Queen is listed as an 'author' on our R packages

Sep 14, 2017 · 2 min read
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A number of people have been surprised to learn that Her Majesty the Queen is listed as an author on a number of our packages. For example, in the SpaDES package:

Author:	Alex M Chubaty [aut, cre],
        Eliot J B McIntire [aut],
        Yong Luo [ctb],
        Steve Cumming [ctb],
        Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, as represented by
         the Minister of Natural Resources Canada [cph]

Note, however, that Her Majesty’s role not as a package author (aut) but as the copyright holder (cph).

It’s common practice in many companies to attribute copyright to your employer, and there are several R packages that list a company as copyright holder. For example, take a look at the packages produced by RStudio (e.g., dplyr, ggplot2).

As a Canadian public servant, the Crown holds copyright on our work, including R packages. (Next time you’re reading a scientific paper produced by a federal employee note the copyright – most publishers assign Crown Copyright in these cases instead of the publisher itself maintaining copyright. E.g., Elsevier.)

So while it may be a little surprising to see The Queen listed (as copyright holder) in the authors list for several R packages, assigning copyright to one’s employer is common in general, and expected for public servants in Canada (and likely other Commonwealth countries).

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Alex M Chubaty
Authors
Alex M Chubaty
Ecologist and simulation modeller

Dr. Chubaty is an ecologist and simulation modeller who builds spatial models of forest landscapes and the species that live in them. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University modelling host selection in mountain pine beetle (MPB), followed by postdoctoral research at Université Laval and Natural Resources Canada developing forecasting models of MPB spread.

He runs FOR-CAST Research & Analytics in Calgary, Canada. His recent work includes LANDIS-II forest landscape simulation studies, landscape connectivity modelling, and analyses of insect outbreak dynamics, to inform land management and species-at-risk decisions. He writes open-source R packages for this work, including grainscape for connectivity analysis, landisutils for LANDIS-II simulations, and co-developed the SpaDES simulation platform. He advocates for open data and reproducible workflows.