

When I was preparing my first first-author publication as a graduate student many moons ago, I desperately wanted to be the corresponding author. I wanted to be the first to get the reviews back from the journal and to have the experience of preparing a response to the editor. But even more than that, I wanted to get what used to be standard back then—the snail mail postcards from all over the world requesting snail mail reprints. How excited my grad school friends and I would get when someone in Nigeria wanted to read our paper! We competed for the most exotic reprint request, collected the stamps, put pins on a world map, and happily addressed envelopes to all corners of the globe.

Not too long after that first paper, postcard requests and hard copy replies were replaced by instantaneous email exchanges, which could get article copies into requestors’ hands quickly, cheaply, and more easily. For all the improvements in scientific communication powered by information technologies, that visceral joy and personal connection with people who want to read your work are largely gone now.

But I digress. In the decades since I was a graduate student, authorship has evolved in many different ways

First, there are many more authors per paper. Physics leads the way in this, but a biology paper on sequencing the Muller F element in the Drosophila genome garnered a lot of attention last year for having 1,000-plus authors, including more than 900 undergraduate students who contributed to sequence annotation and corrections. That's roughly 10 words per author. Even if we disregard that interesting extreme example, studies show that the average number of authors per paper in 2012 was 5.25, nearly doubling from 2.7 in 1980.

Second, biomedical science is becoming more and more interdisciplinary, with molecular biologists, cell biologists, clinicians, engineers, and physicists working together to tackle big questions. This is undeniably awesome, but it often means that no one author on the paper really understands and can vouch for all the data.

Third, with the number of people entering the academic pipeline still growing (out of proportion to the number of opportunities to be successful and make a career of it), there is increasing pressure to amass every drop and dribble of credit. This means authorship discussions are more complicated and heated than they used to be. It is not uncommon now to see requests for five equal first authors, three equal fifth authors (can we really measure the contribution of the fifth author position so precisely that we can say three are equal?), or four corresponding authors. One response to this focus on ascribing credit is the helpful new CRediT taxonomy that Cell Press authors are encouraged to use, which specifies the contribution of each author in the list. For more on the CRediT taxonomy, see this CrossTalk post and our followup post from last week.

And fourth, as expectations for transparency and accountability increase, there is more pressure on journals to take responsibility for confirming that all authors are aware of and have assumed the responsibility that comes with being an author. This is not always as straightforward as it sounds if contributing authors have moved on to new labs and geographies, have left science entirely, or don’t respond to queries.

With these points as a backdrop, I'd like to talk about the role of the corresponding author (CA), what it means to be accountable, and why authors should think carefully about whether CA is a designation they are prepared to take on.

Authorship lists are like sports team rosters. Everyone in the list did his or her part (pitcher, catcher, shortstop) to "win the game" of answering the question they set out to answer. Like players who win or lose together on a team, authors get credit for their contributions: all share in the glory, if the work wins a Nobel Prize, and in the credibility hit, if ethical challenges about the work arise. And like sports teams, the authorship collaboration has a coach—the CA.

For Cell Press journals, a balance of opportunities and responsibilities come with being a CA. The CA is responsible for compliance with journal policies. This means she needs to ensure that all authors are aware that the manuscript is being submitted and have had a chance to read it and sign off on it; that the potential conflicts of interest of each author are surfaced and thoughtfully collated; and that at least one author has seen, reviewed, and can vouch for the veracity of ALL of the data in the paper. The CA is also the person readers are directed to if they have questions or requests for reagents, and is the person responsible for ensuring reagent and data-sharing policies are followed. The CA is the person we will go to with any questions related to the manuscript; she is the “responsible party” and the final decision-maker for any issues that may arise between authors during the peer review process or after publication.

These are not trivial responsibilities. For this reason, we are keen to have a single corresponding author. But such a policy does not sit well with the current use of the designation in the community, where it is now used more to indicate seniority and leadership on the team than to indicate any particular set of responsibilities. Our current policy is to allow two CAs (and in extenuating justifiable circumstances to make an exception and allow three). But this middle-of-the-road "compromise" policy is not ideal, either for authors, who often want more than two CAs, or for us, when we have two or more “responsible parties” to engage with. When issues arise, having two CAs can be equivalent to having none. Think a Super Bowl team three points down in the final 2 minutes with two co-head coaches making a play decision on fourth down at the 35 yard line.

So what to do? We are currently discussing an idea that would uncouple the accepted community use of the CA designation from policy compliance responsibilities. We envision the creation of a new authorship designation of guarantor. Under this policy, a paper could have as many CAs as the authorship team felt appropriate, but there would be one guarantor who may or may not be one of the CAs. The guarantor would take on ownership for compliance, pre- and post-publication, with all journal policies and would be the final decisionmaker on behalf of all the authors for any actions that need to be taken.

We are eager to hear what you think of the idea of a guarantor author. Would you as an author take on such a designation? Would you as a reader find it clarifying and helpful? How important is it to you that there is clear accountability for reagent sharing, COIs, and data veracity? What other ideas should we be considering? C’mon this is a blog, so please comment!