GYA member Mohammad Hosseini (Northwestern University, United States) and GYA Co-Chair Yensi Flores Bueso (University College Cork, Ireland) together with GYA Advisory Board member Véronique Kiermer (Chief Scientific Officer of PLOS), along with other luminaries in Open Science, have co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that discusses good authorship practices, which are often at the heart of research integrity and trust in science debates.
The paper, “Creating a responsible authorship culture in science: Anchoring authorship practices in principles of transparency, credit, and accountability,” offers a practical and principled framework for how research teams can make authorship decisions fairly and transparently and offers specific recommendations for institutions on how to foster a responsible authorship culture.
This framework proposes three interconnected principles: transparency, credit, and accountability. Together, these principles offer research teams a solid foundation for authorship decisions — one that is flexible enough to work across fields, career stages, and the realities of modern collaborative science.
The authors hope institutions worldwide will adopt these recommendations and revise their guidelines accordingly. The more researchers engage with responsible authorship, the stronger and more equitable the community becomes. A trustworthy research enterprise starts with being transparent about who did what and clearly specifying who is responsible for what part of the research. Using the suggested framework and the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) can support this process.
The work proceeded from a poster presented during the 2025 Peer Review Congress in Chicago, and was completed as part of a transdisciplinary working group convened by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The team brought together researchers from different disciplines, sectors, and career stages.