Authorship and Contributorship
Two perspectives:
应对教育委员会专注于does it mean to be an author?
Authorship policies and practices: The role of research institutions
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应对教育委员会专注于does it mean to be an author?
COPE’s Core practice #2 onauthorship and contributorshiprecommends that members should have clear policies in place (that allow for transparency around who contributed to the work and in what capacity), describing requirements for authorship and contributorship as well as processes for managing potential disputes.
Authorship issues are the mostcommon concernsfor COPE members, and COPE has created dedicated resources to help address these issues, including: aguide for new researchers on handling authorship disputes,COPE discussion document on authorship(in the process of being updated), aneLearning module(members only), specificflowchartsto support editors handling authorship issues and a classification of‘authorship’ casesfrom COPE’s Cases Database.
Based on the nature of these cases, which often come down to two or more contradicting viewpoints, if an authorship dispute arises during peer review, there is little the journal can do other than put the manuscript “on hold” and refer the situation to the authors’ institutions. Due to the need for help from institutional contacts[HLT1] , journal collaboration with institutions is key, and we take the opportunity to highlight several resources shared by members of COPE’sinstitutional pilothere:
For example, Kelly Cobey (Senior Clinical Research Associate, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute) shared the institutional perspective on authorship duringCOPE’s webinaron “Standards in Authorship.”
Mark Hooper and colleagues from QUT sharedseveral resourceson authorship and publication.
In addition, Siu-wai Leung, University of Macau, Hong Kong, also gave hisperspectiveon good authorship practices at COPE’s first China Seminar on “The Pillars of Publication Ethics”
It isclearthat although authorship and contributorship roles vary widely across the humanities, social sciences and biomedical sciences, institutions and journals need to have clear policies and wide-reaching training in place. There are some recent initiatives that are helping, for example,ORCIDand the CasraiCRediTtaxonomy are taking steps forward in ensuring transparency and accountability. See “in the news” for more related items on this topic.
Elizabeth Moylan on behalf of the COPE Education Subcommittee
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Authorship policies and practices: The role of research institutions
COPE Council notes that “authorship is one of the most common concerns of COPE members” (2014). The COPE Core Practice site onAuthorship and Contributorshipoffers extensive resources that explain the author’s roles and responsibilities and offer guidance on resolving authorship issues. Of particular note are the Discussion Document "What constitutes authorship?"; the position statementResponsible research publication: international standards for authors, the guideline如何处理著作权纠纷:新指南吗researchers. These resources reflect a wide range of authorship issues encountered in the publication process:
- Undeserving authorship
- Disputes around author order
- Requests to withdraw from the author list after submission
- Omissions from the author list
- Author inability to respond to reviewer comments
- Author disagreement around article corrections
- Unauthorized use of collaborator’s (or student/advisee’s) work
- Request to change author’s name after publication
- Submission of paper without consent of co-authors
- Conflicting claims of intellectual property
Left unchecked, authorship issues threaten to impede timely dissemination of new knowledge and diminish credibility of scientific research. All stakeholders in the research enterprise must articulate expectations for authorship integrity as integral to the responsible conduct of research.Yet funders, editors, peer reviewers, and professional colleagues have little ability to resolve authors disputes when they arise. COPE Council emphasizes that this responsibility rests with the author’s institution (2014).
Research institutions -- as the home of significant research production and knowledge dissemination-- have a critical role in facilitating and enforcing responsible authorship practice. Important mechanisms for fulfilling this responsibility include:
- Employment, matriculation, internship, and fellowship agreements that specify expectations for researcher integrity and consequences for violating standards and norms
- Intellectual Property policies that explain ownership of research outputs produced with institute resources or on institute time, clearly delineating the circumstances where the institute owns the work and what genre(s) of research outputs are covered by the policy (papers, data, software, etc).
- Handbooks and manuals that guide affiliated researchers at all levels on managing the rights in their works and those held by the Institute. Appendixes may include sample copyright transfer agreements; guidance on retaining author rights; and applying open licensing
- Thesis manuals that include guidance on including published or submitted material in the thesis; appropriate placement of copyright or Creative Commons notices on title pages and at section breaks; and a template for acknowledging contributors and sponsors
- Model student-advisor compacts that research laboratories can adapt to the lab’s policies on authorship and contributorship (the framework developed by theAssociation of American Medical Collegesprovides a good starting point);
- Training and ongoing support on authorship best practices and standards including criteria for authorship and norms for authorship order; ethics of attribution; use of digital author identifiers includingORCiD; and application of theContributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)system to articulate author contributions.
- Training and ongoing support on copyright and author’s rights that covers the complexity of authorship concerns at a research institution: eligibility for copyright protection; works-for-hire; copyright transfer and permissions; joint authorship; and copyright termination rights.
- Services and tools that facilitate author integrity, such as similarity checking software for manuscripts before submission
- Qualified mediation assistance to help research collaborators resolve disputes before entering the publication process
Without question, the research institution’s sustained investment in sound authorship policies and practices is considerable. The high return on that investment is two-fold: first, a publication system that produces the highest quality record of knowledge to benefit society; and second, a community of authors whose accomplishments and innovations reflect the strengths and impact of their home institutions.
Gail Clement, Head of Research Services, Caltech Library, Pasadena, USA