Mbirn: BIRN Authorship Policy

History:

It is important to have a policy that all of us involved in the BIRN project can "get behind". This proposal for BIRN authorship guidelines began as an adaptation by Randy Gollub from the Harvard Medical School (HMS) authorship guidelines using early input from Martha Payne. It has been subsequently edited to incorporate suggestions made during numerous open forum discussions at the All Hands Meetings in 2002 and 2003, and the F-BIRN Meeting in March 2004 as well as copious, recent email exchanges by many BIRN members as they were preparing their first joint manuscripts. It is the launching of these first publications that drove this final draft. Thus, while this proposal is not yet formally ratified by the BEC, it is in informal use by the BIRN community.

Prelude (copied directly from HMS): Authorship is an explicit way of assigning responsibility and giving credit for intellectual work. The two are linked. Authorship practices should be judged by how honestly they reflect actual contributions to the final product. Authorship is important to the reputation, academic promotion, and grant support of the individuals involved as well as to the strength and reputation of their institution.

Many institutions, including medical schools and peer-reviewed journals, have established standards for authorship. These standards are similar on basic issues but are changing over time, mainly to take into account the growing proportion of research that is done by teams whose members have highly specialized roles.

In practice, various inducements have fostered authorship practices that fall short of these standards. Junior investigators may believe that including a senior colleague as an author will improve the credibility of their work and its chances of publication, whether or not the colleague has made substantial intellectual contributions to the work. They may not want to offend their senior staff, who hold substantial power over their employment, research opportunities, and recommendations for jobs and promotion. Senior faculty may wish to be seen as productive researchers even though their other responsibilities prevent them from making direct contributions to their colleagues' work. They may have developed their views of authorship when senior investigators were listed as authors because of their logistic, financial, and administrative support alone.

Disputes sometimes arise about who should be listed as authors of an intellectual product and the order in which they should be listed. When disagreements over authorship arise, they can take a substantial toll on the good will, effectiveness, and reputation of the individuals involved and their academic community. Many such disagreements result from misunderstanding and failed communication among colleagues and might have been prevented by a clear, early understanding of standards for authorship that are shared by the academic community as a whole.

Discussions of authorship in academic medical centers usually concern published reports of original, scientific research. However, the same principles apply to all intellectual products: words or images; in paper or electronic media; whether published or prepared for local use; in scientific disciplines or the humanities; and whether intended for the dissemination of new discoveries and ideas, for published reviews of existing knowledge, or for educational programs.

BIRN Authorship Policy

Summary

Authorship should be determined by level of effort and should conform to highest academic standards as outlined in the HMS guidelines (http://www.hms.harvard.edu/integrity/authorship.html). BIRN contributors only become authors if they meet the criteria of substantial intellectual contribution to the manuscript and not by the fact that their data was used in a study.

Many different ways of determining order of authorship exist across disciplines, research groups, and countries. Examples of authorship policies include descending order of contribution, placing the person who took the lead in writing the manuscript or doing the research first and the most experienced contributor last, and alphabetical or random order. While the significance of a particular order may be understood in a given setting, order of authorship has no generally agreed upon meaning.

As a result, it is not possible to interpret from order of authorship the respective contributions of individual authors. Promotion committees, granting agencies, readers, and others who seek to understand how individual authors have contributed to the work may read into order of authorship their own meaning, which may not be shared by the authors themselves. Therefore these guidelines provide a means to address this situation.

Acknowledgment of both funding for the BIRN project and of the specific groups contributing data is as important as appropriate inclusion in authorship. The following sections are to provide guidelines on ethical behavior as it relates to recognition and attribution of individual effort toward publications.

It is the responsibility of the BIRN Executive Committee to adjudicate in cases of dispute and to ensure that there will be no conflict of interest between developers and users of the BIRN database.

Details

Although authorship practices differ from one setting to another, and individual situations often require judgment, variation in practices for BIRN supported publications should be within these basic guidelines.

• 1. Research teams within the BIRN group should discuss authorship issues frankly and early in the course of their work together.

• 2. Everyone who is listed as an author should have made a substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work. For example (in the case of a research report) they should have contributed to the conception, design, analysis and/or interpretation of data including development of the written report. Honorary or guest authorship is not acceptable. Acquisition of funding and provision of technical services, patients, or materials, while they may be essential to the work, are not in themselves sufficient contributions to justify authorship.

• 3. Everyone who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the work should be an author. Everyone who has made other substantial contributions should be acknowledged.

• 4. When research is done by one or more teams whose members are highly specialized, an individual's contributions and responsibility may be limited to specific aspects of the work.

• 5. All authors should participate in writing the manuscript by reviewing drafts and approving the final version.

• 6. The authors should decide the order of authorship together.

• 7. One author should take primary responsibility for the work as a whole even if he or she does not have an in-depth understanding of every part of the work.

• 8. This primary author should assure that all authors meet basic standards for authorship and should prepare a concise, written description of their contributions to the work, and how they have assigned the order in which they are listed so that readers can interpret their roles correctly, subject to approval by all authors. This record should remain with the sponsoring department.

• 9. All authors should approve the list of authors certifying that they are not aware of anyone else who should be included.

• 10. Seminal publications from all BIRN projects that are written to demonstrate the achievement of the stated Specific Aims of the initial grant proposals (e.g. the primary analyses of the multi-site calibration data collected and analyzed jointly by all sites) should include in the author list or title the name of the relevant BIRN test bed. The position in the authorship list or title and the exact wording for the citation (e.g. “FIRST BIRN”, or “FIRST BIRN Research Group”, or “on behalf of the FIRST BIRN Research Group”) may vary depending on the requirements of the journal where the work is published and by the agreed upon wishes of the test bed researchers. The acknowledgements sections should include the full list of contributing scientists and their corresponding institution. Note that since the composition of contributing scientists to any given BIRN test bed will change over time, it is necessary to capture the names of all those who have contributed to the experimental design, acquisition and /or analysis of data used in the manuscript.

The appropriate names for each of the test beds are: - Mouse BIRN - FIRST BIRN - Morphometry BIRN - BIRN Coordinating Center

• 11. Disputes over authorship are best settled at the Working Group level by the authors themselves or the Test Bed P.I. If local efforts fail, the BIRN Executive Committee will assist in resolving grievances.

Implementation

• This BIRN authorship policy will be posted on the http://www.nbirn.net web site and will be included in the BIRN procedure manuals. These authorship policies shall be included in our orientation of new members.

• Authorship policies will be reviewed at each annual All Hands Meeting and the policies updated to reflect our developing culture and experience.

Acknowledgements

All publications should acknowledge BIRN and other related grants using the formats given below. Any use of BIRN data resources (technology, software, and/or archived data) requires acknowledgement. Secondary use of archived imaging or other data requires acknowledgement of the sites where the data was collected, grant support information, identifying Principal Investigators, title of project that collected the data, preferably by citing the published work that describes the acquisition and primary analysis of the data. All publications should acknowledge all sites that contributed data to the work done in the manuscript.

"This research was supported by [GRANT #] to the [GROUP] Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN, http://www.nbirn.net), that is funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."

(Under construction- tough given the flux in funding mechanism)

Whenever possible both acknowledgements and authorship should be made specific to the particular BIRN group generating the manuscript. Hence, the words GRANT # and GROUP above would be one of the following:

- [list all four fund numbers], [], to have a global acknowledgement
- [mouse #], [Mouse], for work developed mainly by Mouse BIRN
- [first #], [FIRST], for work developed mainly by FIRST BIRN
- [P41 RR14075-03S1], [Morphometry], for work developed mainly by Morphometry
BIRN
- [cc#], [Coordinating Center], for work developed mainly by BIRN CC

Examples of BIRN generated publications (BIRN Investigators)

• 1. Scientific manuscripts resulting from multi-site data analysis for BIRN Specific Aims using BIRN data.
• 2. Scientific manuscripts resulting from multi-site data analysis using BIRN data, BIRN data analysis tools or methods not directly addressing BIRN specific aims.
• 3. Scientific manuscripts covering the development and/or validation of methods for cross platform data acquisition, data correction, network infrastructure, multi-site image visualization, multi-site software data analysis tools, data base creation, data sharing, subject confidentiality, etc.
• 4. Review articles dealing with the BIRN (no new findings).

Examples of BIRN generated publications (non-BIRN Investigators)

• 1. Scientific manuscripts resulting from multi-site MRI data analysis for non BIRN Specific Aims using BIRN data.

Respectfully Submitted by:

Randy Gollub, Chair