Arbitration is needed to resolve scientific authorship disputes
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ethical Issues, Legal Issues, Science Policy
- Keywords
- authorship, publication, arbitration, journal policy, disputes
- Copyright
- © 2018 Faulkes
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Arbitration is needed to resolve scientific authorship disputes. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26987v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26987v1
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.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. It has been submitted to PLOS Biology.