In the Connexions system, people are associated with content (modules and courses) through roles. The most familiar role is that of Author: the people responsible for the intellectual component of the content. In addition, we separately track the copyright holders (who can often differ from the intellectual authors), and maintainers, who have editorial duties. Today's new feature: easy control of the order of Authors on the published content. Let the battles over first authorship begin!

An equally important change has occurred in the process of deriving a copy of content. This creates a derivative work, based on the original work. In the software world, we call this a "fork", like a fork in the road: a common origin, but two separate paths forward. In better keeping with the spirit and letter of the Creative Commons license, newly derived content is now solely attributed to the deriving author. Optionally, original authors may accept a request to collaborate as primary authors on the derived work: the deriving author has the discretion to withdraw this offer.

Original authors are always acknowledged as the authors of the parent work. For example, in Connexions, the movie "West Side Story" would have been credited: West Side Story by Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Ernest Lehman, based on Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

We're walking the line here between misattribution and plagiarism: technical methods to reduce one may inadvertently encourage the other. We think this new system strikes a better balance.

Kudos to Kyle for his hard work on this.