Contribution vs Credit vs Authorship for software

While preparing for a workshop that the URSSI project is hosting on software credit today, I started thinking again about a recent blog by Titus Brown, “Revisiting authorship, and JOSS software publications.” Titus says, “fundamentally, in order to nurture a diverse array of valuable scientific contributions, we need new models of publication with new models of authorship,” a statement with which I strongly agree, and in fact, part of the reason for the upcoming URSSI workshop.

He also said “If [someone] can pinpoint the contribution made by an individual, andit was a positive contribution, as opposed to an extractive one, that person is a contributor. … And contributors deserve to be offered authorship.” My immediate thought was that this made sense, and I said so in a comment on Titus’s blog.

However, I then read Luis Pedro Coelho’s response to Titus’s blog, “Thoughts on ‘Revisiting authorship, and JOSS software publications,’” which made me realize my first reaction was a bit naïve, as happens to all of us sometime.  Luis writes “My position is against every positive contribution deserves authorship. Some positive contributions are significant enough that they deserve authorship, others acknowledgements, others can even go unmentioned.” And, following the lines of an old joke, I agree with this too.

As both Titus and Luis reminded me, contribution and credit and authorship are really three different things. Thinking about software projects, or really about almost any collaborative activity, we want to first record positive contributors and their contributions, then provide appropriate credit for those contributors. Finally, in the case of academia, we decide that some of these contributions pass a bar and qualify the contributor as an author.

(Note that in academia, we have changed the word “author” to no longer mean a person who writes but is instead, simply a level of contribution. It would be amusing to read a newspaper article about a person who merely suggested an idea to a writer about the plot of a future novel later request that they should be made an author of the finished book, while if that book was a bestseller, it wouldn’t be surprising for the first person to sue the author for some of the profits.)

Thinking about the three concepts one at a time, a contribution that should be recognized is, as Titus and Luis both agree, any positive contribution to the software project, whether in code or not, whether in the repository or not, etc. It’s not too hard to record contributions by adding the contributor’s name to the CONTRIBUTORS.txt file in the software repository.

And all of these contributors should get credit for their contributions.  But how should we record this?  Is there a way to record the type or value of each contribution?  And a way to add them up to determine the total amount of credit that should be given to each person? (If we could do both, we could use this to implement transitive credit.)

Project CRediT, which I wrote about a few years ago, is an attempt to describe types of credit for work involved in writing papers.  It would likely be possible to find a community view of the equivalent types of work involved in writing software projects. This would then allow recording contributions as they happen along qualitative lines, basically in a more complex CONTRIBUTORS file.

If authorship is considered a contribution that rises above some bar, how do we determine where that bar is, and how do we quantify contributions to check on their value in comparison? One idea is to borrow from the movie industry, where some contributions (e.g., the director’s) are always enough to be listed, which others (e.g., costume cleaning) may not be. I’ve been told that even for movies where there is a long list of credits at the end, with large numbers of people shown from various special effects companies, that the contract with those companies includes a maximum number of people who can be listed in the end credits, so these are not really complete listings.

I think determining where the bar is likely must be done by communities, somewhat in the same way that journals represent the work of communities (sometimes also referred to as clubs). However, the decisions about the value of individual contributions probably need to be made by each software project itself.

In summary, I think a short-term solution is:

1. to collectively decide what types of software contributions there are,
2. to decide, in the context of communities, where the bar for authorship is, and what types and amounts contributions should qualify,
3. to record the individual contributions and their types, and
4. to let the lead author make the final decision on authorship, with acceptance from the other authors, and with the peer-reviewers and editors representing the overall community confirming this decision.

In the longer term, we need to stop using the term author as the means of recognizing all significant contributions, and possibly go to a movie-like system where we name contributors and explain their contributions, and where author would be one of many types of contribution.

Acknowledgements: In addition to Titus’s and Luis’s blogs, previous discussions with Karthik Ram, Arfon Smith, and Matt Turk influenced my thinking on these issues.