PLOS Collaborates on Recommendations to Improve Transparency for Author Contributions

In a new report, a group convened by the US National Academy of Sciences and including a dozen journal editors reflects on authorship guidelines and recommends new ways to make author contributions more transparent. What does it mean to be author number seven on a twenty-five–author article? Establishing transparency for each author’s role in a research study is one of the recommendations in a report (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/26/1715374115) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a group led by Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences. The recommendations were adapted based on community feedback and peer review from an original draft presented as a preprint (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/20/140228). PLOS supports the recommendations for increased transparency and has already put some of them in practice. A more systematic description of author contributions is a prerequisite to providing due credit for roles that are instrumental to the research enterprise, especially those roles that are too often ignored or devalued. For example, collecting, curating and sharing a dataset or developing a new methodological approach that can be reused by others are key contributions that may not always land a ‘first author position’ but have applications beyond a single article and deserve recognition. Transparency also brings more accountability to a system where questionable and even detrimental pract...
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