In her blog, Professor Anne Ridley reflected on the progress made with scientists working together in teams and the benefits it has to all. Following on from this, Cory Craig, Mohammad Hosseini and Alison McGonagle-O’Connell report on a recent FORCE workshop that explored the value that the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) can bring to research contributions and think about the challenges of describing those contributions and where next.

At the FORCE 2018 Conference, we facilitated a workshop to explore the issue of how to best define and bring transparency to authorship and contributions to research, bringing together dozens of participants from across research and scholarly communications.

The workshop included a discussion of OpenVIVO and the Contributor Role Taxonomy (known as CRediT). CRediT is a community-led standard currently being used across an increasing number of journals to provide a simple way to ensure transparency around author contributions to published research output. Adoption and interest in CRediT continues apace, and there is general agreement across the scholarly ecosystem that having greater information about researcher contributions has a great many benefits.

However, recognizing that the concept and definition of contribution/s are not static and may need to evolve over time, the focus of the workshop was to gather feedback about CRediT and other notions of contributorship going forward. Following presentations from:

Cory Craig of University of California at Davis, a participant on the CRediT Program Committee, as well as the author of a book chapter on CRediT[1] Collaborative Knowledge Foundation’s Alison McGonagle-O’Connell, co-chair of the CRediT Program Committee presented an overview presentation on the current state of CRediT adoption[2] and systems integration, and a preview of some very early analysis leveraging a single adopting publisher’s CRediT data set Mohammad Hosseini of Dublin City University presented an interactive session exploring the ethical implications of using CrediT, and mentioned some of the tasks that are currently not covered.

Participants moved into break out groups and were tasked with exploring and reporting back on three themes:

Why/ where there might be barriers to the adoption/implementation of structured contributor roles in various arenas of research

of structured contributor roles in various arenas of research How the CRediT taxonomy might evolve in the future to perhaps support some of the challenges identified

to perhaps support some of the challenges identified The ethical aspects of describing contributions and some of the unintended consequences

Potential barriers to implementation

The focus of many of the barriers was research perceptions and practical workflow issues to allow contributions to be captured easily, specifically:

Adding contributorship roles can be challenging for articles with large numbers of authors. Assigning authorship roles, needs to be part of the joint work of creating the paper, not just a step at the end for the corresponding author

For adoption to happen researchers need to know what’s it in it for them (for the middle authors, a lot) – important to communicate what the benefits are

Contributor roles & CRediT Taxonomy, can be used differently by different groups of people

Males and female roles/perceptions of the work can differ

Are some contributor roles valued more than others?

Visualization: how is information on contributor roles ingested? How does it go from machine-readable to visible to human readers? How does it interact with publication workflows, data repositories, etc.?

Crossref: can it accept author roles as part of article meta-data?

ORCID: adoption of CRediT by ORCID would speed uptake of CRediT

CRediT only deals with a way to make contributorship transparent, it does not fix all problems in scholarly publication.

Evolving the CRediT taxonomy

In thinking about potential development of the taxonomy into the future, establishing what are considered important contributions beyond what’s included in the taxonomy today was the starting point. It was argued that the notion of ‘worthy contribution’ or ‘intellectual contribution’ as some have defined it, differs per discipline.

Other considerations for a future iteration of the CRediT taxonomy included:

Ideas that are copyright-able and will eventually be protected by copyright laws were suggested as unique forms of contributions that could potentially necessitate the presence of legal advisors or patent-experts in projects. In the current list of roles, legal advisors and their contributions are not envisaged

Contributions of language professionals and translation services are currently missing in the taxonomy

The role called ‘Software’ was believed to be too general. Software design, software testing, software documentation, software development, software maintenance, etc. are all quite different from each other, but CRediT taxonomy consolidates all of them into one category

Ethical aspects

In terms of the ethical considerations for adoption of defined contributor roles, the issue of how to ensure justice and fairness in relation to the assignment of contributors of scientific projects dominated the conversation.

Last, participants summarized the day’s learnings by listing three positive and three negative words in response to perception of CRediT; the results are two word clouds (see Figure 1 and Figure 2), augmented in real time.

Figure 1. Three positive words about the CRediT taxonomy

Figure 2. Three negative words about the CRediT taxonomy

Lots to think about, and there are many ways to connect with the issues of contribution to research and CRediT:

1) Contact the authors to explore collaboration opportunities.

3) For publishers providers: adopt and watch this space!

4) For technology providers: Integrate!

[1] Cory Craig. Contributorship and Authorship Hierarchy as a Form of Credit. Credit Where Credit Is Due: Respecting Authorship and Intellectual Property. January 1, 2018 37-49 DOI:10.1021/bk-2018-1291.ch003

[2] Allen, L. O’Connell, A. and Kiermer, V. (2019), How can we ensure visibility and diversity in research contributions? How the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is helping the shift from authorship to contributorship. Learned Publishing, 32: 71-74. doi:10.1002/leap.1210