Enhancing inclusive and visible consumer authorship: Recommendations for research and publishing practice

As the research community increasingly partners with consumers and community in the design and conduct of research, there should be a corresponding increase in visibility of consumers as authors of published papers. Recent studies have explored the perceptions of Editor-in-Chiefs regarding the acceptability for consumer co-researchers to be authors on papers (Cobey et al., 2021), the diversity in consumer authors (Woolley et al., 2023), and the identification of consumer-authored papers (Arnstein et al., 2020; Cox et al., 2021; Oliver et al., 2022). Although these studies suggest a changing direction in publishing, they also collectively highlight that continuing work is required to achieve inclusionary consumer authorship practices. With this editorial, we aim to synthesise the current recommendations for publishing with consumer authors while highlighting further considerations based on our experiences. We will use the following terms: consumer and community, as used within Australia, in lieu of patient and public involvement, and co-researcher in lieu of partner or collaborator.

Consistent with recommendations, it is important that we first identify ourselves and our respective positionality. Louise Gustafsson is Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal (AOTJ) and has a commitment to partnering with consumers in research. She has written this editorial from two perspectives, as editor of a journal with a commitment to partnership with consumers and as a researcher with experiences of publishing with consumer co-researchers. Ruth Cox is a Director of Occupational Therapy in a public health service and recently completed her PhD regarding consumer partnerships in quality improvement and research. Her passion for promoting and supporting consumer partnerships aligns with her personal and professional ethics. Elizabeth Miller was a co-researcher across Ruth's PhD and has collaborated on many other studies, co-authoring 13 papers. She has a degenerative health condition that affects her mobility and believes that when patients, caregivers, and researchers work together collaboratively, outcomes are greatly enhanced.

Guidelines for authorship were developed by the scientific community to ensure appropriate attribution for the work based on two common criteria ‘(1) substantial contribution to the work and (2) accountability for the work that was done and its presentation in a publication’ (COPE, 2019). Our research and experiences have demonstrated that manuscript authorship inclusive of consumers is important not only as a means to ethically acknowledge the collaboration but as an essential element of consumer reward and recognition (Cox et al., 2023). Hence, we must ensure that interpretation of authorship policies embraces the diversity of our consumer partners and supports people who have lower literacy levels, who speak a language other than English, or who live with disability to meaningfully contribute. Consumers add their unique perspectives to research through their lived experience, and this must form the basis of recognition of their contribution to authorship.

Plain language versions of author guidelines are available to support conversations between consumer authors and research teams (Envision Pharma Group, 2022; Woolley et al., 2020), and it is recommended that these are utilised. In our experience, taking the time as a team to prepare the GRIPP2 (Staniszewska et al., 2017) checklist has been a highly valued process for ensuring that the benefits, challenges, and influence of the consumer voice are recognised and celebrated by the research team.

Academic publishing is built on the assumption that authors have a recognised affiliation, but this is not necessarily true for a consumer author. One recommendation is for the consumer author to affiliate with the institution where the work was completed. However, some consumers may consider that an affiliation with an institution may compromise the perception of their otherwise independent perspective (Richards & Elliott, 2023). We assert that it is appropriate for consumer authors to list their affiliation as ‘consumer co-researcher (or partner)’, or the term agreed upon within the research team. This approach is supported by AOTJ as a strategy to strengthen the ability to identify consumer authors, which has been previously highlighted as difficult and a shortcoming of publishing practices (Oliver et al., 2022). Indeed, we would suggest that any consumer authors should have two affiliations if they wish to be associated with an institution—one affiliation would be consumer co-researcher (or partner) and the other affiliation would be the institution. The key here is that the consumer has choice about whether to include an institutional affiliation and in whichever order they feel best demonstrates their identity.

The points outlined above are based on our experiences across multiple projects and submissions to a range of journal titles. We have sought to highlight recommendations that are relevant to researchers, reviewers, and publishers. We contend that is essential that support provided to consumer co-researchers during the research process must extend through to dissemination of information. Although there has been some progress, as a research and publishing community, we still have some way to go to promote visibility and inclusive consumer authorship.