A new taxonomy of research contribution

Project CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is an initiative led by The Wellcome Trust and Digital Science and facilitated by CASRAI and NISO. The project is developing and maintaining recommendations for a new science-oriented contributor role taxonomy.

The project co-chairs, Liz Allen, Head of Evaluation at the Wellcome Trust and Amy Brand, VP Academic and Research Relations at Digital Science, are seeking feedback on the project. They are looking for your opinion on each of the 14 terms included in the taxonomy and your ideas on how the taxonomy might be best implemented.

The Subject Matter Experts Working Group (SME-WG) on Project CRediT have built on the work of the Wellcome-Harvard contributorship project by extending community participation in the initiative, to include a wider range of publishers, researchers, funders, and academic administrators.

Traditional conventions for the representation of authorship lag behind the capabilities of online research information and tend to obscure the contributions of researchers involved in collaborative research. There is growing interest among researchers, funders, institutions, editors, and publishers in increasing both the transparency and accessibility of contributions to research. Many publishers now require contribution information as part of article submission, at the same time that funders are developing more rigorous ways to track the outputs and impact of their research investments.

If you’re interested and you’re based in the US then you’re very much encouraged to come along to the Project CRediT workshop in Washington, DC on December 10th.