diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 3f940e37aa..967cc4d97f 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -28,6 +28,10 @@ Authors@R: c(
   person("Francois","Cocquemas",   role="ctb"),
   person("Matthieu","Gomez",       role="ctb"),
   person("Philippe","Chataignon",  role="ctb"),
+  person("Nello","Blaser",         role="ctb"),
+  person("Dmitry","Selivanov",     role="ctb"),
+  person("Andrey","Riabushenko",   role="ctb"),
+  person("Cheng","Lee",            role="ctb"),
   person("Declan","Groves",        role="ctb"),
   person("Daniel","Possenriede",   role="ctb"),
   person("Felipe","Parages",       role="ctb"),
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index d1b6b90bcd..1b8be36b5a 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -81,6 +81,8 @@ unit = "s")
 
 ## NOTES
 
+0. Retrospective license change permission was sought from and granted by 4 contributors who were missed in [PR#2456](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/pull/2456), [#4140](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/pull/4140). We had used [GitHub's contributor page](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/graphs/contributors) which omits 3 of these due to invalid email addresses, unlike GitLab's contributor page which includes the ids. The 4th omission was a PR to a script which should not have been excluded; a script is code too. We are sorry these contributors were not properly credited before. They have now been added to the contributors list as displayed on CRAN. All the contributors of code to data.table hold its copyright jointly; your contributions belong to you. You contributed to data.table when it had a particular license at that time, and you contributed on that basis. This is why in the last license change, all contributors of code were consulted and each had a veto.
+
 1. `as.IDate`, `as.ITime`, `second`, `minute`, and `hour` now recognize UTC equivalents for speed: GMT, GMT-0, GMT+0, GMT0, Etc/GMT, and Etc/UTC, [#4116](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/4116).
 
 2. `set2key`, `set2keyv`, and `key2` have been removed, as they have been warning since v1.9.8 (Nov 2016) and halting with helpful message since v1.11.0 (May 2018). When they were introduced in version 1.9.4 (Oct 2014) they were marked as 'experimental' and quickly superceded by `setindex` and `indices`.