A new approach to authorship: Institutions must decide

Well done for being brave enough to challenge the status quo and taking on powerful vested interests.¹ Don Quixote or The Terminator? Time will tell.

Embroiled recently in my first authorial dispute (and I truly hope the very last) I now see how difficult all of this can be. But it absolutely does not have to be that way. In order to improve the current system, we will all (contributors, authors, editors) need to work together in an open and transparent way.

Here are my suggestions:

1. A ‘guarantor’ author is appointed to adjudge and arbitrate over submitted material and authorships, so assuming all of the responsibility to ensure the correctness and probity of the data/results/presentation, including the presence and positioning of all authors involved.

2. Journals must insist on a contributions/attributions audit being submitted with the first draft of every article. Each author on the manuscript will have had to have indicated their particular contributions, and these statements will need to be explicitly verified by the guarantor author on manuscript submission.

Disputes about authorship and positioning would therefore arise and have to be solved within the institution submitting the work, not at the journals the work is submitted to. This is fundamental as journals cannot properly ascertain the facts after the event.

The minimum possible standard for authorial inclusion would be both (1) a material contribution to the collection, analysis and presentation of the manuscript material and (2) reading, critiquing and explicitly approving the manuscript for submission to the journal.

What I am proposing is not revolution, merely evolution – and something fairly easily accommodated into current practice.

I agree with you, Dr Abbasi. This area urgently needs attention and revision.

Competing interests

None declared