This post is written in response to a recent article: “Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration, and credit,” Learned Publishing 28(2), April 2015 (DOI: 10.1087/20150211). As a member of the CASRAI working group who “provided critical review of the [contributorship] taxonomy,” I am generally supportive of this idea of better and identifying contributions to scientific works.
This is an expansion of a comment on Titus Brown’s blog post “Please destroy this software after publication. kthxbye.” which talked about how much work should go into software that was used in a submitted paper. In the past, I’ve thought of software as having one of two different purposes: Some software is just written for a single research purpose – this can be quick and dirty, as long as it does the immediate job.
The end of last week (26 March) marked the start of my fourth and final year as a rotator at NSF. It’s been a really good experience so far, and I’m a bit sad to see the end coming. I’ve really enjoyed being able to work with a wonderful set of people in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and across NSF.
“Our Scholarly Recognition System Doesn’t Still Work” is the title of a panel at the Science of Team Science Conference that I’m co-organizing with Amy Brand (Digital Science), Melissa Haendel (Oregon Health & Science University), and Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski (Elsevier) If you are interested in this topic, you may want to consider attending the conference and the panel.
The problem The following question was emailed to me by Jim Fowler: “I’m a professor at Ohio State and I sit on the committee which is drafting a new IP policy for faculty work. I’d like the new policy to support faculty contributions to open source software projects. I am very impressed with what you’ve done to recommend open source licensing on NSF funded projects;
The problem I’ve been thinking about software catalogs for a while, mostly since the program I lead at NSF (Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation, SI 2 , see the second half of http://nsf.gov/si2) has funded a fairly large number of projects, around 100.
I’ve been involved in Project CreDIT a bit, since I read an article on it in Nature: Allen, L. et al. 17 April 2014. Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature 508, 312–313, doi:10.1038/508312a and wrote to the authors, since it seemed to overlap some of the ideas I’d been thinking about called transitive credit: Katz, D.S. 2014.
Over the holidays, I saw an interesting article on F1000Research Soergel DAW.