Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication
Marcia K. McNutt, Monica Bradford, Jeffrey M. Drazen, Brooks Hanson, Bob Howard, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Véronique Kiermer, Emilie Marcus, Barbara Kline Pope, Randy Schekman, Sowmya Swaminathan, Peter J. Stang and Inder M. Verma
PNAS 2018; published ahead of print February 27, 2018,
Edited by Karen S. Cook, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved January 18, 2018 (received for review August 30, 2017)
Abstract
In keeping with the growing movement in scientific publishing toward transparency in data and methods, we propose changes to journal authorship policies and procedures to provide insight into which author is responsible for which contributions, better assurance that the list is complete, and clearly articulated standards to justify earning authorship credit. To accomplish these goals, we recommend that journals adopt common and transparent standards for authorship, outline responsibilities for corresponding authors, adopt the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) (docs.casrai.org/CRediT) methodology for attributing contributions, include this information in article metadata, and require authors to use the ORCID persistent digital identifier (https://orcid.org). Additionally, we recommend that universities and research institutions articulate expectations about author roles and responsibilities to provide a point of common understanding for discussion of authorship across research teams. Furthermore, we propose that funding agencies adopt the ORCID identifier and accept the CRediT taxonomy. We encourage scientific societies to further authorship transparency by signing on to these recommendations and promoting them through their meetings and publications programs.
authorship principlesresearch transparencyscientific integrity
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