Is authorship sufficient for today’s collaborative research? A call for contributor roles

TLDR

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging, but recent work suggests that a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. The authors discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to authorship that impede recognition of contributions and outline requirements for adopting a contributorship-based approach. They introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), a simple data model linking contributors to research objects through their roles and the provenance of the information. Recent efforts include developing the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems to structure contributions.

Abstract

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the information. Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed.