Software Authorship

:link: Website: https://sdruskat.net/software-authorship/

A Collaborations Workshop 2023 hack activity

The aims of this hack day activity are to define guidelines for authorship of software. This activity is necessary because existing authorship guidelines, e.g., for papers, are not easily transferable to software.

The new guidelines will define:

• The importance of authorship specifically for software, taking into account:
  • The different authorship roles for software
  • Different contribution roles
  • The dynamic nature of software development, and different versions of what is perceived to be the “same thing”
• Who is a software author, specifically:
  • What criteria are for software authorship
  • How these criteria can be applied (giving examples)
• Who is a non-author contributor,
  • including example roles of contributors (eg raising bug issues, fixing typos)
  • including guidelines for how to identify when an contributor has transitioned to author, and when an author stops being an author
• When and how authors and contributors should be credited

This activity focuses on authorship of software (“the software itself”). It does not discuss specifics of authorship for related outputs (software papers, papers about software, etc.).

Initial outputs

1. A draft for a definition of authorship for research software. This draft will be proposed to the community to refine it and gain support from relevant stakeholders (such as FORCE11 and ReSA).
2. A proposal for a list of authorship and contribution roles for software, and their relationship to existing roles taxonomies and lists. This also includes more detailed definitions of the single roles, including examples.

Ongoing work

We are in the process of forming a ReSA Task Force to continue the work started during the hack event.

The Task Force will work to involve the community in reviewing and contributing to the definition of software authorship and the taxonomy of software contribution roles, as detailed in the Roadmaps and contribution sections below.

Roadmaps

We consider both outputs of this work - a definition of software authorship, a taxonomy of software contribution roles - as open, living documents. Contributions from the community are welcome during the lifecycle of the Task Force.

Software authorship definition

The progress of this work is tracked in a dedicated GitHub project in this repository.

Outlined briefly, we will take the definition through a three-step process:

1. Solicit reviews and contributions from invited expert reviewers.
2. Prepare and publish a revised version of the definition.
3. Run a consultation with the larger community to solicit further reviews and contributions.
4. Prepare and publish another revised version of the definition.

Software contribution roles taxonomy

The progress of this work is tracked in a dedicated GitHub project in this repository.

Outlined briefly, we will take the definition through a two-step process:

1. Solicit contributions from the larger community for additional existing taxonomies to consider, compare and crosswalk.
2. Prepare and publish the revised version of the taxonomy.

When and how to contribute to this work?

We will publish invitations for the community to contribute to this work at given points in time outlined in the Roadmaps. Specifically, we are very interested in your contributions if you have experience in research (software) policy, open source communities or contributions, contribution taxonomies.

In the meantime, please create an issue if you have ideas to contribute to this repository. However, please be aware that we may only be able to discuss your ideas in depth at a specific point in time as outlined in the Roadmaps.

Contributors

The contributors to the Collaborations Workshop 2023 Hack Day work were:

• Deborah Leem, University College London, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5836-0899
• Gemma Turon, Ersilia Open Source Initiative, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6798-0275
• Hugo Gruson, data.org, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4094-1476
• Neil Chue Hong, University of Edinburgh, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8876-7606
• Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal, Research Software Alliance, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7038-1457
• Sherman Lo, Queen Mary, University of London, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8118-6879
• Stephan Druskat, German Aerospace Center (DLR), https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4925-7248
• Stian Soiland-Reyes, University of Manchester, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
• Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Netherlands eScience Center, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5565-7577

Resources

Following is a list of resources we have used to develop the contents on this repository:

• How can we ensure visibility and diversity in research contributions? How the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is helping the shift from authorship to contributorship (Allen L., O'Connell A., Kiermer V.)10.1002/leap.1012
• Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors (ICMJE)
• Who Did What? The Roles of R Package Authors and How to Refer to Them (Hornik K., Murdock D., Zeileis A.) 10.32614/RJ-2012-009
• Contributor Roles Crosswalk (Habermann T.) 10.5281/zenodo.4767798
• SCoRO, the Scholarly Contributions and Roles Ontology (Shotton D., Peroni S.) 10.25504/FAIRsharing.c86b48
• Contributor Role Ontology (CRO) (Vasilevsky N., White M., Holmes k., Brush M., Haendel M.) 10.5281/zenodo.3570089
• AllContributors.org

Code of Conduct

We are following the Collaborations Workshop 2023 code of conduct for this project.

Cite this project

Leem, Deborah, Turon, Gemma, Gruson, Hugo, Chue Hong, Neil, Kaur Bhogal, Saranjeet, Lo, Sherman, Druskat, Stephan, & Soiland-Reyes, Stian. (2023). SORTÆD: Software Role Taxonomy and Authorship Definition. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7896455