Fixing authorship – towards a practical model of contributorship

Abstract

As we near the completion of the metamorphosis of paper-based scholarly publishing to a medium entirely based on the Internet, so there is increasing need to enrich the environment with a connected network, unfettered by the legacy of putting ink onto paper. One of the more recent areas to come under consideration is issues and concepts of authorship, and how these can be represented in a wholly digital world. For legal and copyright reasons, the concept of ‘an author’ of a scholarly work is likely to persist for some time. However, the idea that a simple list of authors is the optimum way of recording scholarly achievement has reached the end of its shelf life. It’s time to move on. Anyone who is connected with scholarly publishing knows that there are a variety of tasks that are covered and obscured by the term “authorship”, and there are vital research tasks that are not considered to be worthy of the term. Moreover, there are many grey areas: for example, ‘guest’ authorship - where names appear in author lists of people who have had little or no impact on the research work - and ‘ghost’ authorship - where legitimate authors do not appear on the author list for reasons of expediency or politics. Clearly, there cannot be just one resolution for authorship-related problems. However, the study of contributorship - and the development of a standard infrastructure to support more nuanced relationships between researcher and published output - promises to solve the logistical issues, and to illuminate those that have an ethical basis. A prominent example of work in this area is the recent International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution (IWCSA), in which we participated and which recently published its results