Author competing interests

[JGilbert-eLife]

Description

A statement of any conflicts of interest an author may have.

User stories

Author

• As an author, I want to be able to see the competing interest statements listed for each author so that I can check this information is correct.
• As an author, I want to add a competing interest statement to an author so that I can acknowledge conflicts of interest.
• As an author, I want to indicate that an author has no competing interests so that this information can be captured.
• As an author, I want to be able to edit any competing interests statements so that I can correct any mistakes or update the details.

Production staff

But what if . . . ?

Consideration

• If an author has no competing interests, this still needs to be indicated. At the moment in eLife's submission and proofing systems, this is done by selecting a radio button ‘None’ option as opposed to having a free-text box for the competing interest information. In the XML, the footnote then reads <p>No competing interests declared</p>.
• Currently, in eLife XML, the <p>No competing interests declared</p> footnote is shared between all the authors with no competing interests. Footnotes for competing interests are unique to one author each. This is overcomplicated and likely needs to change.
• eLife's current handling is also complicated by the PDF output, which requires multiple different expressions of the 'No competing interests declared' statement, none of which actually include that text. This is probably irrelevant for the purposes of the Texture development but needs in-house eLife work. CC @NickDuf
• eLife uses fn-type="COI-statement" for this in accordance with JATS4R. SciELO uses fn-type="conflict". Presumably this value could vary among other publishers who don't follow JATS4R as well.

XML requirements

Each distinct competing interests statement should be captured as a fn[@fn-type="COI-statement"] in the author-notes. These are then linked to from the appropriate author(s) using an xref

<article-meta>
    ...
    <contrib-group content-type="authors">
        <contrib>
            <name>
                <surname>Gilbert</surname>
                <given-names>James F</given-names>
            </name>
            <xref ref-type="fn" rid="conf1"/>
        </contrib>
        <contrib>
            <name>
                <surname>Atherden</surname>
                <given-names>Frederick P</given-names>
            </name>
            <xref ref-type="fn" rid="conf1"/>
        </contrib>
        <contrib>
            <name>
                <surname>Zoolander</surname>
            </name>
            <xref ref-type="fn" rid="conf2"/>
            ...
        </contrib>
        ...
    </contrib-group>
    ...
    <author-notes>
        <fn fn-type="COI-statement" id="conf1">
            <p>Is an employee of eLife. No other competing interests exist</p>
        </fn>
        <fn fn-type="COI-statement" id="conf2">
            <p>No competing interests declared</p>
        </fn>
        …
    </author-notes>
    ...
</article-meta>

Mock ups

Proposal