New classification of roles aims to reduce contributor disputes in open science

The Wellcome Trust is working publishers, research funders and universities to introduce a new way of classifying the roles of individuals in academic research, laying the foundation for giving credit where it is due, reducing author disputes and removing disincentives to collaboration and the sharing of data and code.

The new Contributor Role Taxonomy, or CReditT Taxonomy, will provide transparency in contributions to published work. Researchers can now be assigned credit and attribution for the wide variety of roles they may undertake, such as data curation, visualisation and software programming.

In addition, the classification will help to improve accessibility and transparency around who did what, to support peer reviewer selection and help researchers identify suitable potential collaborators.

The need arises because the growth in collaborative research and the rise of open science means the number of authors on scientific publications is increasing and ordered lists of author names are proving inadequate for the purposes of attribution and credit.

The taxonomy is to be published in the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) Data Dictionary, enabling a range of pilot projects to implement the taxonomy to start, allowing the concepts to be tested properly.

Liz Allen, Head of Evaluation, Wellcome Trust, said there has been so much support for having improved metadata around the contributions to published output. “Technology can now facilitate this and we are keen to explore how the taxonomy might work in practice and to minimise any unintended consequences, particularly for researchers.

The Wellcome Trust worked with the US company Digital Science and the two information industry standards organisations, CASRAI and the US-based National Information Standards Organization (NISO), to achieve broad community consultation in drafting the taxonomy and testing its fit with a range of scientific fields.

In the second half of 2014, a group of 17 representatives from several publishers, funders and universities met monthly under the auspices of CASRAI to review and refine each of the roles and role descriptions. This group, called Project CRediT, has made available the project overview and the taxonomy.

Publication to the CASRAI data dictionary is a major step forward for Project CrediT, said Amy Brand, vice president of Academic & Research Relations at Digital Science, “It signifies that the taxonomy has undergone a thorough community consensus and standards building process and is now considered ready for use by publishers’ partners.”