Re: Politics and Authorship in Scientific Journals

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Bruce Hayden <bhayden[_at_]ieee.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Joseph P. Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
> >
> > Many moons ago, we had a discussion on whether all of the people
> > mentioned in the ridiculously long list of authors in some scientific
> > articles are true authors as understood in the context of copyright.
> > Eugen Tarnow's article said that it is not necessarily so. The
> > article is located at:
> >
> > That some scientists have no care about compromising the true spirit
> > of authorship is disgusting.
>
> Not really. I think that in a lot of cases the publication is
> viewed as part of the research. There may be one guy who is
> the brains behind the whole operation - but may not have spent
> any time on the publication. Similarly, the guy who got the funding.
> From a copyright point of view, probably neither is entitled to
> authorship. But they will invariably be listed first on the paper
> reporting the research.
>
> The problem is that publication is one of the primary ways in
> which scientific research is distributed and recognized.
> Scientists typically include as authors the people who
> contributed to the research, and not necessarily (and often not)
> the ones who contributed the original expression to the
> paper publishing the research. While original creative expression
> is everything to the copyright atty, it is almost irrelevant
> to the scientists publishing a paper.
>
> However, this does get me to one question that I have had for
> awhile. Five or six years ago, we tried to make a case for
> Fraud on the Copyright Office when a registrant knowingly,
> or with gross negligence, made false statements in a registration
> with the Copyright Office. Contrary testimony by a former
> C/R office atty that registration is extremely permissive
> carried the day with the judge. My question is whether any
> one has ever been able to sucessfully advance this sort of claim.

Just to make further comment. It is sweat of the brow that often times gets one to be an author or co-author, as they are described.

I can speak for my wife, who does scientific research. She is a co-author on 4 different articles that have been published in scientific journals. She was one of the people who led the project team in collecting data, but didn't actually put pen to paper on the article. Although, she did do many of the assays and other data manipulation to support the facts behind the articles.

In the scientific community, it often takes many to write the whole article, simply because there is a reliance on using a team approach. You realize that the work of many Ph.D. candidates relies on the use of a team approach in preparing a dissertation. So it's all part of the culture that the scientific community resides in.

Just my 2-cents,

Craig

Craig Hayward
<chayward[_at_]hbmaynard.com> Received on Thu Jun 17 1999 - 12:47:57 GMT