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

Area of Science:

• Scholarly communication
• Research integrity
• Information science

Background:

• Traditional authorship models present multifaceted challenges, including ethical, social, and technical barriers to accurately recognizing all contributions to scholarly works.
• These challenges can hinder the equitable acknowledgment of diverse roles in research.
• Existing frameworks struggle to capture the full spectrum of scholarly input.

Purpose of the Study:

• To discuss the limitations of current authorship practices in scholarly works.
• To propose a shift towards a more inclusive contributorship model for recognizing research contributions.
• To introduce novel frameworks for structuring and attributing contributor roles.

Main Methods:

• Review of ethical, social, and technical challenges in scholarly authorship.
• Introduction of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO) as an extension of the CRediT taxonomy.
• Presentation of the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM) for data modeling of contributions.
• Discussion of requirements for adopting a contributorship-based system.

Main Results:

• Identification of key challenges impeding the recognition of contributions under traditional authorship.
• Development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO) to enhance contribution structuring.
• Introduction of the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM) for detailed attribution and provenance.
• Outline of necessary steps for implementing a contributorship approach.

Conclusions:

• A contributorship approach, supported by ontologies and data models, can effectively address the limitations of traditional authorship.
• CRO and CAM provide practical tools for better recognition of diverse scholarly contributions.
• Adoption of these models requires careful consideration of implementation requirements to foster research integrity.