Add support for CRediT standard for contributor attribution

[ctgraham]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
There are many kinds of contributions to a scholarly work. OJS, OMP and OPS have no way to capture these distinct roles in a way that is consistent across the industry.

Describe the solution you'd like
Adopt support for the CRediT standard for contributor attribution. This standard has been approved by NISO and identifies 14 different kinds of contributions.

More details about the roles can be found in this comment and a further note on the workflow can be found in this comment.

Who is asking for this feature?
CRediT has been approved by NISO but is not yet widely used.

Additional information
Below is the initial feature request posted by @ctgraham:

Are we interfacing with CASRAI's work on enabling recognition of individual's roles within research output creation?

http://casrai.org/CRediT

This seems like an important future-oriented standard.

---

PRs to implement CRediT support in core:
PKP: #11507
UI: pkp/ui-library#644
OJS: pkp/ojs#4930

[asmecher]

Thanks, @ctgraham. Were you able to find any concrete documentation for the standard?

[ctgraham]

I don't know there is much "concrete" at this point aside from the proposed taxonomy. There appears to be quite a bit of (too much?) implementation flexibility:

Do you anticipate this being a mandatory taxonomy? No, the taxonomy is envisioned as voluntary and each system would choose whether and how to implement. We do see value in the entire community eventually agreeing on a single set of terms, but at a pace appropriate for each stakeholder.
Would this taxonomy be implemented as a drop-down box in software? That is one potential mode of implementation during data entry. We envision multiple ways of implementing the taxonomy – suited to each implementation. But we hope the content of the implementations can be common and standardized.

http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles#Frequently_Asked_Questions

The Interest Group might be a good connection for PKP (or Development Partners).

Mirroring the functionality of the Aries Systems Corp implementation seems like a valuable and tangible goal within the current product:

• The ability to attribute one or more ‘Contributor Roles’ to each Author of a submission
• The ability to identify the degree to which a particular contributor was involved, i.e. one of “Lead”, “Supporting”, “Equal”
• The ability to configure the collection of Contributor Roles per Article Type, as either optional or required.

http://casrai.org/CRediT#Aries_Systems

[fgnievinski]

I think a good start would be for the submission form to offer checkboxes with the 14 contributor roles, with hover-on definitions (listed below).

See how this was implemented in other manuscript submission systems:
https://wkauthorservices.editage.com/resources/author-resource-review/2018/may-2018.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/authorship

Contributor Roles Defined:

• Conceptualization – Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data curation – Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
• Formal analysis – Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition ​- Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation – ​Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology – Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration – Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources – Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software – Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision – Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation – Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• Writing – original draft – ​Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing – review & editing – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.

[ctgraham]

Interesting question from emolls and Miguel_Oliveira_Jr in the forum: Can contributor-role mapping be directly tied to OJS roles for Authors? Are there implications in de-coupling user roles from author (sub)roles? Are there implications in allowing an author to have many roles?

[asmecher]

@ctgraham, the submission step 1 includes a selection of what user group they are operating in when making a new submission. This list includes all "author" (ROLE_ID_AUTHOR) and "manager" (ROLE_ID_MANAGER) roles that the user has in the journal. If there is only one available selection (this is most commonly the case for journal authors) it is automatically chosen and the drop-down list is hidden. If they have no available roles, and author self-registration is enabled, then the default "author" role is automatically assigned and used behind the scenes.

Long story short: a lot of the necessary infrastructure in supporting different forms of contribution is already in place using User Groups. Mappings e.g. to CRediT roles would need to be added, and some testing would need to be done to make sure that this operates as expected throughout, as multiple author user groups are not commonly used in OJS and there may be some assumptions built into the code that don't serve CRediT well.

[ctgraham]

There is another level of selection of the Role (as opposed to User Group?) within the Submission Metadata, under "Edit Contributor". The "Contributor Role" here lists any Role with a "Permission Level" as reported in Users & Roles (same as User Group?) of "Author". This is, I think, where the forum users propose adding a 1:n relationship.

[willinsky]

I may not have understood the discussion above properly, but I would like to add my support for PKP adopting the CRediT standard. It does mean adding a metadata category "Author Role (CRediT)" selected for each author from the CRediT controlled vocabulary of 14 "roles," which would be in addition existing categories for authors such as "affiliation," but this does not impact OJS user roles or permission levels, and would be article dependent.

[pmangahis]

A hosted client has also expressed interest in having this as a plugin.

[NateWr]

I had a discussion with two early career researchers about the CRediT standard and how it should be implemented in our software. The consensus was that it was a) a very good thing and b) authors need an opportunity to declare their own roles as well as dispute other authors' claims.

The main issue is the regular abuse by supervisors and senior academics of authorship attribution, when they claim inappropriate roles on early career researchers' papers. CRediT was seen as a good thing because lots of abuse happens through the ambiguous first author/last author distinctions in disciplines.

They wanted to see a workflow that countered this abuse:

• The submitting author identifies other contributors but is not asked for their CRediT roles.
• Each contributor is emailed (maybe after passing peer review) and presented with a form where they must tick off the roles they believe they qualify for.
• When all contributors have completed this, the submitting author is asked to confirm or clarify any role attribution before the article is published.
• Editors should the final arbiters of any disputes that arise, and they should be the one's responsible for clarifying what roles should be designated.

[asmecher]

@NateWr, just flagging that some of this might be possible to delegate to the ORCID workflow, since it already provides a way to ping secondary contributors so that they can authenticate themselves against that service.

[nuest]

I think it would be great to capture author contributions in OJS with CRediT. Just one more related idea (I can try to dig up the original article on that - it's not mine): OJS could show the authors in randomised order or suggest/force alphabetical order on the website, as the real contributions are properly modeled.