Authorship is a hot topic in the scientific and medical publishing world. Who qualifies as an author? Who is the senior author? What are the responsibilities of the corresponding author? Opinions vary across disciplines and cultures. Whereas medical publications generally follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf),1 academic publications may follow other guidance, or none at all. Is there a way to impose universal authorship criteria and quantify the work of authors so that their actual contributions can be tracked, giving them more than just their name on an article in the modern publish-or-perish environment?
A recent article by McNutt et al2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) seeks to create a framework for doing just that. As part of the global push toward greater transparency, with the goal of increasing integrity and trust in scientific publications, this article proposes that journals develop standardized authorship requirements and reporting, documented through ORCID identifiers (https://orcid.org) and the CRediT system (http://docs.casrai.org/CRediT).