The Contributorship Collaboration was born about a year and a half ago, with the aim of improving the recognition of the people who contribute to science, getting beyond traditional author lists that don’t indicate who did what.
Many have highlighted this issue before, including the “Hidden REF” project in the UK; as they write, “The ways in which research impact is judged overlooks many of the people who are vital to the success of research.” A few months ago the Hidden REF project awarded a commendation to CRediT, a taxonomy that helps indicate who did what in scientific articles. Much of our work has focused on promoting the use of CRediT.
The first real event of the Contributorship Collaboration was a hackathon we organized at the October 2023 Big Team Science conference to translate CRediT from English into other languages. For more about why such translations are needed, see our post on the NISO CRediT site.
Following the hackathon, additional volunteer scholars joined us, and we collaborated via monthly Zooms, as well as through email and Slack. In addition to creating a nice community 😊, our main achievements are:
Creating a website that publishes our translations in
- a machine-readable JSON metadata schema that we created
- renders the JSON files into a human-readable version
Drafting, finalizing, and publishing translations of CRediT into Amharic 🇪🇹, Chinese - simplified 🇨🇳, Chinese - traditional 🇹🇼, Czech 🇨🇿, Danish 🇩🇰, Dutch 🇳🇱, Farsi 🇮🇷, French 🇫🇷, German 🇩🇪, Greek 🇬🇷, Japanese 🇯🇵, Korean 🇰🇷, Norwegian - Bokmål and Nynorsk 🇳🇴, Polish 🇵🇱, Portuguese 🇵🇹, Russian 🇷🇺, and Spanish 🇪🇸
- Drafting additional translations into Hungarian ðŸ‡ðŸ‡º, Korean 🇰🇷, Malay 🇲🇾, Malayalam 🇮🇳, Ukrainian 🇺🇦, and a few other languages, to be finalized later. Translations typically involve at least two fluent speakers.
Outreach and education
In the realm of outreach and education, this year we:
- Reached out to journals, scientific societies, and scientific academies via email. This was not only to inform them about CRediT and our translations, but also about contributorship more generally.
If you know of journals, scientific societies, or publishers working in languages other than English that might be able to make use of a CRediT translation, let us know and we’d love to have your help in contacting them to spread the good news. We like to take that opportunity to make people aware of the concept of contributorship more generally, and how to get beyond the artificial constraints of traditional authorship practices. You can register your interest in helping at the Google form.
Published a post on the translation project on the NISO site for CRediT.
Wrote a Wikipedia article on CRediT.
Implementing CRediT in OJS
Thanks to a small grant from the Experiment Foundation/Schmidt Futures, we have been able to work with Open Journal Systems /PKP to facilitate implementing CRediT in the open source Open Journal Systems, which is used by thousands of journals, especially free diamond open access journals and those in the Global South.
Register your interest in using the plugin, or helping with the project, here - we are especially looking for researchers/editors associated with journals that use OJS.
What’s happening in 2025
Ongoing projects include:
- Creating a FAQ to answer common questions about CRediT, conceptual, practical, and technical
- Advocating that journals start giving CRediT to non-author contributors, mainly people traditionally listed in the Acknowledgments.
- You can follow our progress via Mastodon as well as this blog.
We have periodic videocalls to discuss and work on these issues, follow us on Mastodon for announcements. We can also meet in person at Metascience 2025(London, in June), the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science(Budapest, in June), and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-research and Open Science(October).
Oh, another way to help would be to just give money to the project 💰😀 .
Photo: CC-BY Alex Holcombe