We have been collaborating with Mozilla Science Lab, BioMed Central (BMC), Public Library of Science (PLoS), The Wellcome Trust, and Digital Science, among others, to develop a prototype for assigning badges to individuals based on the contributor role vocabulary developed by Project CRediT earlier this year. Here we share the details of this project, and invite you to participate!
Project CRediT – contributor roles and ORCID
The work of Project CRediT originated at a May 2012 workshop, co-hosted by the Wellcome Trust and Harvard University, which brought together those interested in exploring contributorship and attribution models. This meeting spawned a working group charged with developing a controlled vocabulary of roles that could be used to describe typical research “contributions”. The group tested its draft taxonomy with corresponding authors publishing across science disciplines. The outcomes of the pilot test are described in this Nature commentary (April 2014).
The Project CRediT taxonomy consists of the following 14 contribution types to scholarly work, along with guidelines on how these roles may be assigned:
- conceptualization – ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
- methodology – development or design of methodology; creation of models
- software – programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
- validation – verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
- formal analysis – application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data
- investigation – conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
- resources – provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
- 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
- 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
- visualization – preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation
- supervision – oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
- project administration – management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
- funding acquisition – acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication
Later this year,ORCID will be incorporating these contributor roles into our Registry. For each contribution (such as an article, dataset, or presentation) connected to and displayed on an ORCID record, the record holder will be able to select their role(s) they played from the Project CRediT list.
Contributorship badges prototype project
A contributorship badges prototype project (PaperBadger) is also underway, led by Mozilla Science Lab. The project is seeking open source contributions by others in the community, and invites you to participate. Abigail Cabunoc Mayes of Mozilla has written a fantastic blog post that outlines how people can get involved and learn more about the project. In addition, the group has monthly update calls to discuss progress. The next call on August 14 is open to anyone who is interested; the notes and video of the previous call on July 23 also are available. I hope to see many of you on the collaboration list this month!
