About This Project

An over-reliance on authorship to index researchers' achievements has held back scientific collaboration. Recently, however, academic journals have become more willing to formally recognize not just those who contribute to the writing of a paper, but also other contribution types. This helps democratise science. Our project will facilitate this change in science by implementing the CRediT standard in open-source software used by thousands of academic journals.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Academia's incentive system has glommed onto authorship of articles as its index of scientists' achievements. For those who contribute to science but not to the writing-up, this frequently deprives them of a career path. Moreover, it has driven collaborations to be small, hindering the skill specialization that drives progress across a range of human endeavors.

For example, one of us (AH) was on a path to specialize in scientific programming, which later became enormously important with the rise of programming-heavy fields such as bioinformatics and brain imaging. However, because the norm was not to award authorship for contributions to software development, AH conformed to the more feasible path of becoming a jack-of-all-trades.

What is the significance of this project?

The culture around crediting researchers is slowly changing for the better, but the technology that would allow implementation of this has lagged (there is little funding available for scholarly communication infrastructure). Addressing this will both make science more fair and also it should speed scientific progress, as it will remove one of the brakes on scientific collaboration.

The last few years have seen a rapid rise in international collaboration thanks in part to greater willingness to work over video calls, however the associated researchers have had trouble receiving career credit. Completion of our project will encourage more and larger international collaborations, so that research will happen that otherwise would not have occurred.

What are the goals of the project?

We hypothesize that this project will result in more scientific research conducted by larger and more diverse teams. We will quantify this by the number of authors per journal article, and number of countries represented, across the associated journals compared to others.

Adding CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy) to the most popular open-source academic journal management system, Open Journal Systems will immediately allow hundreds of journals to recognize a wider range of types of contributions to research. We will also add uploading of CRediT to indicate who did what in a project, so researchers can use our free open-source app to prepare the CRediT information. Read more about that here.