Modernizing authorship criteria and transparency practices to facilitate open and equitable team science.

Abstract

Background: The rapid acceleration of authorship inflation-increasing numbers of authors per publication in collaborative research-has rendered the traditional "substantial contributions" criterion for authorship and the lack of transparency in author contributions increasingly problematic.Methods and results: To address these challenges, a revamped approach to authorship is proposed, replacing the rigid requirement of "substantial contributions" with a more flexible, project-specific criterion of "sufficient contributions," as determined and justified by the authors for each project. This change more accurately reflects and accommodates the proliferation of scientific collaboration ("team science" or "group science"). It broadens the scope and granularity of roles deserving of authorship by integrating the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) and Method Reporting with Initials for Transparency (MeRIT) systems. It mandates in-text documentation of who did what (e.g., who collected what data) and moves beyond the typical binary (all-or-none) classification by assigning a gradated contribution level to each author for each role. Contributions can be denoted using an ordinal scale-either coarse (e.g., lead, equal, and supporting) or fine-grained (e.g., minimal, slight, moderate, substantial, extensive, and full). To support the implementation of the revamped approach, an authorship policy template is provided.Conclusions: Adopting proportional, role-specific credit allocation and explicit documentation of contributions fosters a more transparent, equitable, and trustworthy scientific environment.