Although there are clear guidelines for authorship in the Vancouver Protocol and I believe ESA actually follows these guidelines, I believe that the guidelines adopted (which were for medical journals) are unnecessarily rigid. The four guidelines are:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND - Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND - Final approval of the version to be published; AND - Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. However I question whether it is really essential in every case to meet these guidelines. Specifically when a researcher suffers an untimely death and leaves unpublished data that others are familiar with and can publish. You may think this is a straw woman but I am dealing with this situation right now. Frankly I believe it would be unethical to put the deceased's name in the acknowledgements (as the protocol states) rather than as a coauthor. I really don't see in ecological or evolutionary or taxonomic work where it is necessary for *every* author to satisfy these conditions and frankly I doubt these conditions are actually met in the majority of large multi-authored papers (say papers with 5-15 coauthors) regardless of what box you check in the submission form. (Typically the senior author just checks a box that says everyone meets these conditions or at least has read the final version of the paper.) I think a system where the senior author is responsible for meeting these conditions is reasonable for our field or even a majority of authors must meet them. I know the guidelines were set up to reduce fraud (notice how it seems to be mostly medical folks <g>) and also to reduce the frequency of "courtesy" authorship (where someone who wasn't really involved in the research in a meaningful way is "given" authorship. For example, in the days when Department Heads controlled in house research funding, I have been told there were cases where you didn't get any research funding unless you put the Department Head's name on your papers. I have been in a similar enough situation so that I believe this likely occurred. Finally, I doubt that it has reduced the frequency of courtesy authorship, and perhaps even fraud, although I don't have any data on these things. In ecology today we have entered a realm where the use of other researcher's data is becoming more and more common. I published my first paper using someone else's data in 1982 (Grossman et al. Am. Nat. 120:423-454) and included the original author because I wanted to be able to ask him questions regarding his methods etc. given that my usage of the data was different from his original. In addition, and perhaps this seems charmingly "old school" I couldn't have published a paper without his data and therefore coauthorship was entirely appropriate. However, this "convention" seems to be going by the wayside if the requests I receive for my data sets are any indication. I would ask, how could an author answer the four criteria above without a coauthor who knows how the data were collected, sampling efficiency, analyzed, etc? Should having just collected, and published data automatically warrant coauthorship...I would say it depends. When I have been in this situation I have always been involved in design and writing of the paper to earn my coauthorship but I'm sure others handle it in manyfold ways. Well those are my thoughts. Let the discussion begin. g2 -- Gary D. Grossman, PhD Fellow, American Fisheries Soc. Professor of Animal Ecology Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA 30602 Website - Science, Art (G. Grossman Fine Art) and Music www.garygrossman.net Blog - https://medium.com/@garydavidgrossman Board of Editors - Animal Biodiversity and Conservation Editorial Board - Freshwater Biology Editorial Board - Ecology Freshwater Fish Hutson Gallery Provincetown, MA - www.hutsongallery.net/artists.html
