Alternative Policies for Collaborative Publishing in Natural Resource Journals

ABSTRACT

Authorship of academic articles remains contentious, especially in the context of reporting from community-based participatory research. Policies and guidelines exist to help decide when authorship is warranted, but there are gaps in process and practice for inclusion of community-based groups as authors. We synthesize the experience of a collaborative group in submitting a manuscript derived from blending Traditional Knowledge and science-based approaches into the larger practice of the institution of peer-reviewed publications. We then provide survey results from 11 journal editors across natural resource and policy journals on their policies for authorship and copyright signatories for community-based groups. We create a spectrum of empowerment for publishing with community-based groups, and map our sample to that spectrum. Implications for journal editors, community-based participatory researchers, and community members are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• community-based participatory research
• empowerment
• policy

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Slave River and Delta Partnership for their patience in resolving publication hurdles throughout the Slave Watershed Environmental Effects Program work, and for helping ease future publications for other groups through sharing their experiences. We also thank Diane Dupont, Jennifer Fresque-Baxter, and Erin Kelly for helpful comments on draft versions of this article.

Notes

SWEEP is a community-based research project with a goal of building a community-based legacy environmental monitoring system with Traditional Knowledge and Western science indicators to monitor cumulative effects of development in the watershed. Data are blended through a Bayesian Belief Network to support community decision making on guiding questions about the health of the Slave River and Delta ecosystem. SWEEP involves trusting and respectful partnerships between communities, territorial and federal agencies, educational institutions, and researchers.

Although this is changing, particularly in northern Canada, few would argue that a meta-analysis of environmental indicators would be stronger than a local person’s account of an environmental change he or she noticed (see, e.g., Armitage, de Loë, and Plummer 2012; Parlee 2012).