Authorship and justice: Credit and responsibility

ABSTRACT

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), those who make significant intellectual contributions to a research project, and accept indirect responsibility for the entirety of the work should be listed as authors. All other contributors should be merely acknowledged. I argue that the ICMJE policy is unjust by consequentialist, deontological, and common sense standards. Because different sorts of contributions are incommensurable, ranking contributions is usually impossible. In particular, privileging intellectual contributions, and banishing non-intellectual contributions (e.g. funding, administration, routine data collection) to the Acknowledgments section is unfair to non-intellectual contributors. Holding contributors responsible for the errors or misconduct of others is also unjust. Contributors should be blamed (and sometimes punished) for all and only their own errors or misconduct. Their punishment should be proportional to the harm done; their blame to the ease with which their errors and misconduct could have been avoided. The ICMJE policy goes wrong by using the outdated, overly constraining practice of authorship as a vehicle for allocation of credit and responsibility. My alternative policy would replace the author byline and Acknowledgment sections of articles with Contributors pages listing all contributors to the research project, along with descriptions of their contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• collaboration
• ICMJE
• publication ethics
• credit
• responsibility

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Anne Epstein and Mirah Curzer for helping me think through several issues addressed by this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Admittedly, justice is only one of several features that are desirable in a policy allocating credit and responsibility. But it is a very important feature.

2. A third form of credit is to be footnoted for a narrow intellectual contribution. The ICMJE proposal does not mention footnotes, and I too shall ignore them.

3. How interesting (and revealing) that the ICMJE proposal does not even mention those who contribute mundane labor to the research project.

4. Although there are some variations in detail, these four points are agreed-upon by many policy-making bodies and journals (Resnik et al. 2016). All of the policies listed in the introduction include these points, except that rather than holding all authors indirectly responsible for the work, WAME specifies that a single author should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole.

5. For a discussion of the nature and origin of common sense, and its relationships to morality and moral theories, see Gert (2004).

6. The ICMJE proposal contravenes common sense in other ways, too. Because the ICMJE proposal stipulates that an author must meet all four criteria, a paper might easily come into being without anyone qualifying as an author (Shaw 2011).

7. Virtue ethics is an up-and-coming moral theory, but I shall not discuss it here. As with all philosophic theories, both consequentialism and deontology are quite complex and admit of many variations. Here I shall offer only ruthlessly simplified applications of these theories to the issues of credit and responsibility in scientific research. Hopefully, my remarks will provide a starting point for thinking about other, more sophisticate applications of these theories.

8. Where Mill stands on these disputes is, itself, a matter of dispute among interpreters.

9. Act consequentialists are not opposed to policies. They understand policies as rules of thumb – breakable, but to be broken only in extraordinary circumstances.

10. I shall not discuss Kant’s “principle of universal law” because I think it is fatally undermined by the absence of a non-arbitrary procedure for formulating maxims.

11. Several thinkers have proposed ways to weight contributions (e.g. Clement 2014, 350-355). All assume that contributions of different sorts are commensurable. For further criticisms of quantitative ways of distributing authorship see Smith and Master (2017, 248-251). Smith observes that different research projects have different sorts of goals, and suggests that the value of a contribution is a function of the type of goal of the project (Smith 2017).

12. This requirement is hopelessly impractical as well as unjust (Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki 2016b, 1459-1461).

13. Responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so holding supervisors responsible does not necessarily diminish the responsibility of individuals who made errors or committed misconduct.

14. Following other thinkers, I shall call participants in research projects “contributors” rather than “authors” (e.g. Rennie, Yank, and Emanuel 1997, 582). Hopefully, jettisoning the preconceptions built into the term “author” will create psychological space for new, more just ways of assigning credit and responsibility.

15. Some proposals retain the byline and Acknowledgments section, and add a Contributors page (e.g. Smith 2017). However, we are not creating a practice ex nihilo. The convention of authorship is already in place. Under a hybrid system, readers would continue to pay attention to the byline, and ignore the Contributors page.

16. An early proposal by Resnik (1997, 240-241) is similar to mine in several respects. Resnick suggests that each discipline adopt a set of types of contribution (e.g. writing, grant writing, data collection), and list contributors under these categories at the beginning of each article. On Resnik’s proposal, everyone who makes a significant contribution to the research project will be credited, the nature of their contribution will be known, the extent to which they contribute to the project will not be specified, and types of contribution will not be ranked. Resnik’s proposal differs from mine in two ways. Resnik retains the term, “author” as one of the categories, and specifies that authors “take final and full responsibility for their products,” while I jettison the term, “author” as misleading, and maintain that each contributor is responsible only for his or her own contribution to the project. If Resnik were to replace the term, “author” with the term, “guarantor,” and dial back the responsibilities of guarantors, our proposals would align.

17. Initially proposed by Resnik (1997, 582).

18. A proposal by Pennock initially seems similar to mine. Pennock’s basic idea is to credit all contributors and describe their contributions on, “the model of the credits in a film. Rather than a generic or vaguely differentiated list of ‘authors’ the credits should name the participants together with their scientific responsibilities in the research project” (Pennock 1996, 387). Movie credits do not model my proposal, for they privilege some sorts of contributions over others by the size of the print. Pennock’s proposal also privileges certain sorts of contributors. First, Pennock implicitly limits credit to intellectual contributors. Second, Pennock distinguishes (a) “principle investigators” from (b) other intellectual contributors. They receive “primary overall credit and if error or fraud is discovered they will be the ones to hold accountable” (Pennock 1996, 387-388). Finally, Pennock mentions (c) “consulting scientists” who “provided some expert advice or professional service, for example, but who were not actively involved as researchers on the project” (Pennock 1996, 388). These three moves bring Pennock’s proposal close to the ICMJE proposal which relabels these people: (a) author, (b) contributor acknowledged “under a single heading,” and (c) contributor merely acknowledged.

19. Smith’s proposal leaves it up to each multidisciplinary research team to negotiate authorship-order, guided by four principles: desert according to contribution, fairness in evaluation, transparency, and collegiality (Smith 2017). Unfortunately, her proposal would undermine both transparency and collegiality. (a) When a general policy for authorship-assignment is followed by everyone, the byline is informative. But on Smith’s proposal, each team would be using its own idiosyncratic method of authorship-assignment, so readers would not be able to grasp who has done what by looking at the byline. The byline lacks transparency. Since the Contributors page would be doing all of the work, why bother with a byline at all? (b) Negotiating agreements on authorship-assignment independent of any general policy would allow different people to bring different values and priorities to the table with no method of adjudication – a recipe for conflict. Furthermore, negotiations ungoverned by general policies are fertile grounds for the inappropriate exercise of power and prejudice. Thus, requiring teams to negotiate authorship-assignments in the absence of a general policy undermines collegiality.