Authorship practices must evolve to support collaboration and open science

Abstract

Journal authorship practices have not sufficiently evolved to reflect the way research is now done. Improvements to support teams, collaboration, and open science are urgently needed.

PLOS Biology at 20: Exploring possible futures

“…A Perspective by Veronique Kiermer discusses current authorship practices and why they currently fail open science, outlining opportunities for improvement [ 6 ]. It is ironic that at a time of increasing calls for open science, contributions that enable open science are excluded from authorship in widely adopted guidelines.…”

“…As Veronique says, “[i]t does not serve us well to reduce everything to articles as the only valuable output of research” [ 6 ]—we would do well to move to a system that values (and cites) other outputs such as software, data, and materials. This is a point that is also made in an Essay by Robert Thibault, Natascha Drude and colleagues, who write about the future of open science [ 7 ], including a whistle-stop tour of the current open science landscape and their vision for its future.…”