Contributors vs creators

[Rafnuss]

I have been trying to map my datapackage.json to Zenodo but am struggling with the alignment between our contributor field and Zenodo's creator and contributor fields.

According to the DataCite Metadata Schema documentation, creator is defined as:

The main researchers involved in producing the data or the authors of the publication, in priority order.

Whereas contributors are defined as:

The institution or person responsible for collecting, managing, distributing, or otherwise contributing to the development of the resource.

This distinction raises questions for me about what truly defines an "author" if not contributions to the creation of the resource. However, that may be a question for DataCite to clarify.

What I find particularly interesting is that the creator field is mandatory, while the contributor field is optional. Although the DataCite Metadata Schema does not define specific roles for creators, Zenodo does (using the same roles as contributors). However, the distinction in Zenodo depends on whether a person or organization is included in the citation.

In the Data Package schema, there is only the contributors field, which is defined broadly as individuals or organizations that "...contributed to this Data Package." The schema recommends using an established vocabulary for roles, such as the DataCite Metadata Schema’s contributorRole or CRediT, and suggests including a creator role. However, it explicitly states:

Use of the creator role does not imply that the person was the original creator of the data in the data package—merely that they created and/or maintain the data package. It is common for data packages to “package” up data from elsewhere.

This creates a challenge in reconciling the vocabularies and definitions suggested in the documentation.

Suggestions/ideas:

1. Update the link in the Data Package documentation to point to the relevant section of the DataCite Metadata Schema contributor roles.
2. Add a sentence to the Data Package documentation explaining the difference between its contributors and DataCite's contributors, as well as their compatibility (or lack thereof).
3. Rename contributors to creators in the Data Package schema to align with DataCite Metadata Schema, while keeping roles optional.
4. Specify only a single vocabulary to follow, such as the DataCite Metadata Schema.
5. Clarify how names should appear in citations—for example, whether all contributors are included or only those with a creator role (similar to the aut field in R packages: https://r-pkgs.org/description.html#sec-description-authors-at-r).