Welcome! Below you will find a set of roles and responsibilities for participants.
Operating Norms
- Listen to all voices and perspectives.
- Be amenable if you are asked to make space for other people.
- Approach discussions with a learning mindset. Ask others to tell you more about their ideas, especially if you don’t agree with or understand them (e.g., “interesting thought, could you say more about the x aspect?”)
- Provide critiques in a constructive way and use a first person perspective. (e.g. “I think phrase x could be more clear if it included a, b, and c.”; “I would be more comfortable if we included a reference for that statement.”)
- Approach discussions with a “yes and” perspective.
- Be transparent in all data generation and analysis.
roles and responsibilities
Leadership Team
Contributors
Open to all scientists at any career stage
Contributor Responsibilities:
- Mikayla Borton, PNNL and Colorado State University
- Sarah Collins, University of Wyoming
- Emily Graham, PNNL and Washington State University
- Michaela de Melo, Université du Québec à Montréal
- Rob Spencer, Florida State University
- James Stegen, PNNL
- Guide schedule and overall progress
- Communicate with collaborators about progress
- Answers questions from collaborators
- Review contributions and provide feedback
- Maintain a coherent narrative
- Share and celebrate manuscript milestones
- Conflict resolution
- Notification of authorship decisions prior to submission with an opportunity for discussion of any disputes
Contributors
Open to all scientists at any career stage
Contributor Responsibilities:
- Contribute ideas
- Ask questions
- Complete analyses
- Write content
- Generate Figures
- Keeps to the schedule, authorship rules, and operating norms
Collection leadership statement on authorship
Authorship is an important and sometimes challenging topic that requires open, honest communication among a project team. There are many strategies that can be taken to determine who is included as an author and the order in which authors are listed. The leadership team for this crowdsourced collection feels that the approach to authorship is best defined individually for each manuscript team and research topic. The reason is that each research team has different nuances in their needs and dynamics. The leadership team is not in a position to deeply understand those dynamics and, as such, is leaving the authorship approach and associated decisions to each research team. The leadership team is, however, providing guidance and tools associated with authorship best practices so that each team has the tools they need to make authorship decisions that are transparent, equitable, ethical, and mutually agreed upon by all members of the team. This approach is not a ‘top down’ approach in which the leadership team provides a set of definitive authorship rules, but rather a ‘bottom up’ approach in which each team agrees on a policy. However, the leadership team will always be available to help make decisions on a team-by-team basis, with the acknowledgement that decisions are likely to vary across teams due to context dependencies. If any research team would like the leadership team to engage more deeply with authorship considerations, please reach out to us.
Across all manuscripts there are different types of author contributions and levels of author investment, and crowdsourced manuscripts can introduce complexities that typical manuscripts lack. We encourage each manuscript team to decide on and document your authorship criteria now and verify that your whole team agrees. Below we outline criteria that can be adopted by the manuscript teams (sections Adoption of CRediT and Outline of contributions by each coauthor). If a team prefers to adhere to a different set of criteria for authorship than the one outlined below, the team should outline their criteria in a text document and (if applicable) a modified author contribution tracking spreadsheet or other related document. For example, the points system used in the OutlineOfContributions table (discussed below) may be modified, or a completely different system may be used. If any changes are made, the associated text, spreadsheet, table, etc. documents should be posted within the team’s public GitHub by December 17th, 2021. Manuscript teams that wish to use the criteria outlined here can post this document and the OutlineOfContributions table in their public GitHub by December 17th.
It can be helpful to have a clear delineation of the minimum level of effort to qualify as an author. If you feel you have contributed a lot of time and energy into a manuscript, it can be frustrating near the end of the process to see people listed as authors who you feel did not contribute as much. It is helpful to have an agreed upon system of separating people who may have contributed less than others but are still co-authors versus those who did not meet the minimum requirement. We strongly encourage creating space for authors with different levels of engagement in the manuscript. We also encourage you to keep an eye on your author lists and make sure people do not add themselves without contributing anything and without the other authors knowing.