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Smoothing over content issues with co-author agreements

7 10 2021

I’ve written before about guidelines for co-authorship that I’ve formulated after years of accrued hit-and-miss experiences. Here, ‘hits’ refer to positive experiences (thankfully, the majority), and the ‘misses’ obviously refer to those times where co-authorship had become a contentious issue. While guidelines can go a long way to reducing the probability of nasty in-fighting occurring, there is never a water-tight approach that can avoid all problems.

However, the more I delve into multidisciplinary research that covers potentially controversial subjects, the more preparation for combatting future points of contention becomes necessary. What do you do when different specialists contribute material to a paper with which some other co-authors don’t necessarily agree?

Yes, this conundrum is real, and potentially flies in the face of the standard statement (and their variants) needed for most journal submissions these days:

All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version

Note, however, that the statement almost always includes the word ‘approved’ rather than ‘agreed with’. A subtle difference, I know, but it’s an important one.

This is where a pre-submission ‘Co-Author Agreement’ comes into play. Until quite recently, I have only ever prepared one such a document before, and that one was not terribly comprehensive.

But I’ve recently been working with a large, multidisciplinary group of specialists for which an official Co-Author Agreement made a lot of sense.

What is a Co-Author Agreement? It’s essentially a contract that prospective co-authors sign prior to submission of the manuscript to a journal so that potential disagreements can be dealt with more officiously down the track.

I looked for templates online and found a few that were suitable, and then modified it to our specific conditions.

I thought it might be a good idea to pass along a generalised template for a good Co-Author Agreement that you can modify according to your needs. I’ve broken down the content into sections:

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Tags: academic writing, co-author agreement, paper, publication, scientific writing
Categories : author order, authorship, co-author, science writing, scientific writing, writing tips

The Effective Scientist

22 03 2018

What is an effective scientist?

The more I have tried to answer this question, the more it has eluded me. Before I even venture an attempt, it is necessary to distinguish the more esoteric term ‘effective’ from the more pedestrian term ‘success’. Even ‘success’ can be defined and quantified in many different ways. Is the most successful scientist the one who publishes the most papers, gains the most citations, earns the most grant money, gives the most keynote addresses, lectures the most undergraduate students, supervises the most PhD students, appears on the most television shows, or the one whose results improves the most lives? The unfortunate and wholly unsatisfying answer to each of those components is ‘yes’, but neither is the answer restricted to the superlative of any one of those. What I mean here is that you need to do reasonably well (i.e., relative to your peers, at any rate) in most of these things if you want to be considered ‘successful’. The relative contribution of your performance in these components will vary from person to person, and from discipline to discipline, but most undeniably ‘successful’ scientists do well in many or most of these areas.

That’s the opening paragraph for my new book that has finally been release for sale today in the United Kingdom and Europe (the Australasian release is scheduled for 7 April, and 30 April for North America). Published by Cambridge University Press, The Effective Scientist. A Handy Guide to a Successful Academic Career is the culmination of many years of work on all the things an academic scientist today needs to know, but was never taught formally.

Several people have asked me why I decided to write this book, so a little history of its genesis is in order. I suppose my over-arching drive was to create something that I sincerely wish had existed when I was a young scientist just starting out on the academic career path. I was focussed on learning my science, and didn’t necessarily have any formal instruction in all the other varied duties I’d eventually be expected to do well, from how to write papers efficiently, to how to review properly, how to manage my grant money, how to organise and store my data, how to run a lab smoothly, how to get the most out of a conference, how to deal with the media, to how to engage in social media effectively (even though the latter didn’t really exist yet at the time) — all of these so-called ‘extra-curricular’ activities associated with an academic career were things I would eventually just have to learn as I went along. I’m sure you’ll agree, there has to be a better way than just muddling through one’s career picking up haphazard experience. Read the rest of this entry »

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The sticky subject of article authorship

2 10 2015

I have a few ‘rules’ (a.k.a. ‘guidelines’) in my lab about the authorship of articles, but I’ve come to realise that each article requires its own finessing each time authorship is in question. After a lengthy discussion yesterday with the members of Franck Courchamp‘s lab, I decided I should probably write down my thoughts on this, one of the stickiest of subjects in the business of science.

The following discussion can be divided into to two main categories: (1) who to include as a co-author, and once the list of co-authors has been determined, (2) in what order should they be listed?

Before launching into discussing the issues related to Category 1, it is prudent to declare that there are as probably as many conventions as there are publishing scientists, and each discipline’s most general conventions differ across the scientific spectrum. I’m sure if you asked 10 people about what they considered appropriate, you could conceivably receive 10 different answers.

That said, I do still think there are some good-behaviour guidelines on authorship that one should strive to follow, all of which are based on my own experiences (both good and awful).

So who to include? It seems like a simple question superficially because clearly if someone contributed to writing a peer-reviewed article, he/she should be listed as a co-author. The problem really doesn’t concern the main author (the person who did most of the actual composition) because it’s clear here who that will be in almost every case. In most circumstances, this also happens to be the lead author (but more on that below). The question should really apply then to those individuals whose effort was more modest in the production of the final paper.

Strictly speaking, an ‘author’ should write words; but how many words do they need to write before being included? Would 10 suffice, or at least 10%? You can see why this is in itself a sticky subject because there are no established or accepted thresholds. Of course, science generally requires much more than just writing words: there are for most papers experiments to design, grants to obtain to fund them, data to collect, analysis and modelling to be done, figures and tables to prepare and finally, words to write. I’ll admit that I’ve co-authored many papers where I’ve done mainly one of those things (analysis, data collection, etc.), but I can also hold my hand over my heart and state that I’ve contributed more than a good deal to the actual writing of the paper in all circumstances where I’ve been listed as a co-author (the amount of which depends entirely on the lead author’s writing capacity). Read the rest of this entry »