In our view, protocols for academic authorship need to adapt to acknowledge those members of the public who are increasingly engaging in important collaborations with researchers. These citizen scientists, who might include naturalists, farmers or Indigenous communities, rarely meet rigid journal-imposed criteria for authorship (see, for example, go.nature.com/2urkbrp). Consequently, protocols designed to stamp out ethical breaches, such as ghost authorship and conflicts of interest, exclude contributors who are not professional scientists.

Providing due credit is a core tenet of scientific ethics, and citizen scientists are pivotal to research projects and to the resulting publications.

Creating group co-authorships for cohorts of citizen scientists would credit them under a collective identity (see, for example, G. Ward-Fear et al. Trends Ecol. Evol. http://doi.org/ggd6v7; 2019). Furthermore, citizen scientists can play a crucial part in the uptake of scientific understanding by the general public.