Is authorship sufficient for today’s collaborative research? A call for contributor roles

Abstract

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the information. Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed.

Contemporary authorship guidelines fail to recognize diverse contributions in conservation science research

“…health) where contributor role ontologies (i.e. terminology and frameworks) are being developed to provide a structured representation of contribution roles in research and scholarship for both individuals and organizations beyond those listed in the CRediT taxonomy (see Patience et al., 2019, for a list of 25 roles; Vasilevsky et al., 2021, for a list of over 50 roles). We also note that this can be done independently from the CRediT system or other formal structures such as the frameworks just described.…”

From Reductionism to Reintegration: Solving society’s most pressing problems requires building bridges between data types across the life sciences

“…The Contributor Attribution Model (CAM) [ 68 ] used in combination with microannotation or nanopublication [ 39 , 69 , 70 ], wherein metadata are associated with individual data atoms (smallest usable elements), can underpin a system of attribution tracking where individual credit cascades through the long pathway of content flow [ 37 , 39 ]. CAM builds on the work of groups like CASRAI [ 71 ] by using CRediT [ 72 ] to inform the Contributor Role Ontology—the source of role terms in CAM [ 73 ]. (Domain-specific groups like CASRAI are an integral part of developing the community standards discussed above.)…”

Tenzing: documenting contributorship using CRediT

“…CRediT is not a good fit for all disciplines or even all projects within a discipline ( https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/01/20/credit-check-should-we-welcometools-to-differentiate-the-contributions-made-to-academic-papers/). An ontology of roles that is both broader than those of CRediT and also more specific has been developed by the National Center for Data to Health, an initiative of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (Vasilevsky et al, 2020). The scheme is called the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO, https://data2health.github.io/contributor-roleontology/), and it extends the CRediT ontology to include more than fifty roles, including "specimen collection", "librarian", "community engagement", "coordination", and "software testing" (https://www.force11.org/blog/introducing-contribution-role-ontology-developingsustainable-community-driven-approach; Vasilevsky et al, 2020;Ilik et al, 2018).…”