Arbitration is needed to resolve scientific authorship disputes
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Abstract
Authorship of publications is the main way scientists received credit for their academic research. But as scientific research projects have become larger and more collaborative, the number of contributors has increased, and so has the potential for disputes over authorship. There is rarely detailed accounting of effort to justify authorship inclusion or placement. Instead, authorship is often negotiated by research team members, which is complicated by there often being large power differentials between team members. Existing recommendations are to try to get authors to work out disputes between themselves, which is unlikely to occur. There is an urgent need for an independent body that can offer binding arbitration for scientific collaborators and journals, like practices in other collaborative disciplines.
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2018. Arbitration is needed to resolve scientific authorship disputes. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26987v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26987v1Author comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. It has been submitted to PLOS Biology.
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Competing Interests
The author declares that he has no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Zen Faulkes conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The research in this article did not generate any data or code, because it is a commentary.
Funding
The author received no funding for this work.
