Required Roles

There are three primary roles that a person may take when contributing to the Connexions system: Author, Maintainer, and Copyright Holder. In many cases, the same person (or people) will fill all three roles for a given module or collection, but that is not required. For example, an author may transfer copyright of content by selling that material to the copyright holder, who may choose to hire a third party take responsibility for maintaining the content. Every module or collection must have at least one author, maintainer, and copyright holder assigned before that content can be published or updated.

Author

Users listed as authors receive credit for writing the material. The author is the one who is responsible for the creation of the work, but may or may not be the one who actually enters work into the Connexions. Authors do not necessarily hold the copyrights for their own work.

Maintainer

Maintainers are responsible for managing the content by publishing updates and corrections. Only users listed as maintainers have permission to publish updates to a module or collection. Many authors will choose to act as a maintainer for their own materials, but some may choose to hand that responsibility off to another individual or group.

Copyright Holder

Users listed as copyright holders have the legal right to license the materials. In most cases, the copyright holder is the same person as the author, but this may not be the case in some institutions where faculty and employees are required to sign over copyright to the institution. In this case the institution serves as copyright holder and the individual retains the author and/or maintainer roles. Similarly, authors who have sold their materials to publishers often transfer their copyright to that publisher as part of the sale.

Optional Roles

In addition to the three required roles listed above, there are two optional roles for Connexions content: Editor and Translator.

Editor

Users listed as editors receive credit for editing a module or collection. Editing duties may include checking the material for accuracy, grammar, spelling, organization, and so on. Unlike authors, editors do not take credit for the ideas behind the content, but rather for its organization and presentation. Editors do not have rights to publish materials in Connexions, so editors who are also responsible for keeping modules or collections up-to-date must be assigned the maintainer role in order to publish new versions of the content. Editors are listed under the "More about this content" link that appears at the end of the module.

Translator

Users listed as translators have taken existing Connexions content and translated it from one language into another. Translators are listed next to the authors' names in the content headers. As with editors, translators do not have permission to publish or update modules, so translators with publication responsibilities should also be assigned as maintainers for the content.

Connexions uses this role information to determine proper attribution for modules and collections, as well as for derived copies of existing content. When you change roles for a module or collection, a role request is sent to any Connexions user who was added or removed from a module's collaboration list. These changes do not take effect until all parties with role changes accept the role requests and the content is (re)published. This process ensures that all users have an opportunity to approve of any attribution changes involving that person. Modules cannot be published or updated while role requests are pending.