Add support for CRediT standard for contributor attribution

[ctgraham]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
There are many kinds of contributions to a scholarly work. OJS, OMP and OPS have no way to capture these distinct roles in a way that is consistent across the industry.

Describe the solution you'd like
Adopt support for the CRediT standard for contributor attribution. This standard has been approved by NISO and identifies 14 different kinds of contributions.

More details about the roles can be found in this comment and a further note on the workflow can be found in this comment.

Who is asking for this feature?
CRediT has been approved by NISO but is not yet widely used.

Additional information
Below is the initial feature request posted by @ctgraham:

Are we interfacing with CASRAI's work on enabling recognition of individual's roles within research output creation?

http://casrai.org/CRediT

This seems like an important future-oriented standard.

[asmecher]

Thanks, @ctgraham. Were you able to find any concrete documentation for the standard?

[ctgraham]

I don't know there is much "concrete" at this point aside from the proposed taxonomy. There appears to be quite a bit of (too much?) implementation flexibility:

Do you anticipate this being a mandatory taxonomy? No, the taxonomy is envisioned as voluntary and each system would choose whether and how to implement. We do see value in the entire community eventually agreeing on a single set of terms, but at a pace appropriate for each stakeholder.
Would this taxonomy be implemented as a drop-down box in software? That is one potential mode of implementation during data entry. We envision multiple ways of implementing the taxonomy – suited to each implementation. But we hope the content of the implementations can be common and standardized.

http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles#Frequently_Asked_Questions

The Interest Group might be a good connection for PKP (or Development Partners).

Mirroring the functionality of the Aries Systems Corp implementation seems like a valuable and tangible goal within the current product:

• The ability to attribute one or more ‘Contributor Roles’ to each Author of a submission
• The ability to identify the degree to which a particular contributor was involved, i.e. one of “Lead”, “Supporting”, “Equal”
• The ability to configure the collection of Contributor Roles per Article Type, as either optional or required.

http://casrai.org/CRediT#Aries_Systems

[fgnievinski]

I think a good start would be for the submission form to offer checkboxes with the 14 contributor roles, with hover-on definitions (listed below).

See how this was implemented in other manuscript submission systems:
https://wkauthorservices.editage.com/resources/author-resource-review/2018/may-2018.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/authorship

Contributor Roles Defined:

• Conceptualization – Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• 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.
• Formal analysis – Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition ​- Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation – ​Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology – Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration – Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources – Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software – Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision – Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation – Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization – Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• 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.

[ctgraham]

Interesting question from emolls and Miguel_Oliveira_Jr in the forum: Can contributor-role mapping be directly tied to OJS roles for Authors? Are there implications in de-coupling user roles from author (sub)roles? Are there implications in allowing an author to have many roles?

[asmecher]

@ctgraham, the submission step 1 includes a selection of what user group they are operating in when making a new submission. This list includes all "author" (ROLE_ID_AUTHOR) and "manager" (ROLE_ID_MANAGER) roles that the user has in the journal. If there is only one available selection (this is most commonly the case for journal authors) it is automatically chosen and the drop-down list is hidden. If they have no available roles, and author self-registration is enabled, then the default "author" role is automatically assigned and used behind the scenes.

Long story short: a lot of the necessary infrastructure in supporting different forms of contribution is already in place using User Groups. Mappings e.g. to CRediT roles would need to be added, and some testing would need to be done to make sure that this operates as expected throughout, as multiple author user groups are not commonly used in OJS and there may be some assumptions built into the code that don't serve CRediT well.

[ctgraham]

There is another level of selection of the Role (as opposed to User Group?) within the Submission Metadata, under "Edit Contributor". The "Contributor Role" here lists any Role with a "Permission Level" as reported in Users & Roles (same as User Group?) of "Author". This is, I think, where the forum users propose adding a 1:n relationship.

[willinsky]

I may not have understood the discussion above properly, but I would like to add my support for PKP adopting the CRediT standard. It does mean adding a metadata category "Author Role (CRediT)" selected for each author from the CRediT controlled vocabulary of 14 "roles," which would be in addition existing categories for authors such as "affiliation," but this does not impact OJS user roles or permission levels, and would be article dependent.

[pmangahis]

A hosted client has also expressed interest in having this as a plugin.

[NateWr]

I had a discussion with two early career researchers about the CRediT standard and how it should be implemented in our software. The consensus was that it was a) a very good thing and b) authors need an opportunity to declare their own roles as well as dispute other authors' claims.

The main issue is the regular abuse by supervisors and senior academics of authorship attribution, when they claim inappropriate roles on early career researchers' papers. CRediT was seen as a good thing because lots of abuse happens through the ambiguous first author/last author distinctions in disciplines.

They wanted to see a workflow that countered this abuse:

• The submitting author identifies other contributors but is not asked for their CRediT roles.
• Each contributor is emailed (maybe after passing peer review) and presented with a form where they must tick off the roles they believe they qualify for.
• When all contributors have completed this, the submitting author is asked to confirm or clarify any role attribution before the article is published.
• Editors should the final arbiters of any disputes that arise, and they should be the one's responsible for clarifying what roles should be designated.

[asmecher]

@NateWr, just flagging that some of this might be possible to delegate to the ORCID workflow, since it already provides a way to ping secondary contributors so that they can authenticate themselves against that service.

[nuest]

I think it would be great to capture author contributions in OJS with CRediT. Just one more related idea (I can try to dig up the original article on that - it's not mine): OJS could show the authors in randomised order or suggest/force alphabetical order on the website, as the real contributions are properly modeled.

[willinsky]

@nuest Daniel, we have always to be careful, as platform developers, to support publisher policies and practices, including the promotion of what we see as best practices among those policies and practices. CReDiT has that publisher support at this point, so we can make it an option. Do you see that for randomized or alphabetical author order?

[fgnievinski]

may I suggest offering initially simply a free-form field where the lead author can paste the entire contributors' role statement, such as:

"ABC contributed to conceptualization, data curation, and formal analysis; DEF contributed to funding acquisition and project administration; GHI contributed in supervision and writing."

normally the statement is discussed and composed among team members outside of OJS.

[fgnievinski]

also please note that it's becoming more and more common for journals to incorporate the contributors' role statement in the published article, at the bottom of the text, just before References.

[nuest]

@willinsky I certainly was not considering the broader perspective of publisher policies in my suggestion. Support for randomisation or other ordering should certainly be optional, and maybe the feature is better suited for a plug-in.

Re. the free-form field, I want to point out that explicit modelling (from the start) is a better basis for future meaningful annotation and publishing of the roles properly in well-defined (or even stanardised) metadata. A free-form field as an alternative to CRediT does have benefits, for example if authors or journals feel overwhelmed or restricted by the formal definitions of CRediT.

[marcbria]

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (a national agency) will probably ask all science journals to use CRediT to specify the role of each author.

[asmecher]

@marcbria, that's a good incentive to get this launched! But two questions...

• is the distinction between author and translator relevant to their use case? It's the most common distinction editors need (anecdotally) but CRediT doesn't have it.
• what mechanisms will the agency want to use to consume CRediT metadata? (E.g. OAI-PMH, CrossRef, etc)

[ajnyga]

I think a lot of our problems derive from the fact that we try to use the same taxonomy of user roles both for:

1. Handling user permissions in the system, ie. what can a user do with a specific role
2. In article metadata desrcibe the contributors role

We should take Credit into account, but it will not solve some of the problems that we have in upstream use of contributor data. While it does have a wide variety of roles described, they are actually a) very hard to understand if you show them on the article landing page and b) not very functional for some common purposes, for example telling the difference between the author and the translator, or author and the volume editor.

We should:

1. Separate these two very different ways of using our current role taxonomy: Continue to have the current approach for user permissions BUT create a separate Contributor Role taxonomy just for metadata purposes, something we can map to different metadata schemas (ORCID, Crossref etc.). Basically determine a set of roles that work in most cases, like Author, Chapter Author, Editor, Translator etc.

2. Figure out how Credit Roles are uses

For example in ORCID, we need to be able to say if the contributor is a translator. We have no good way of doing that: https://github.com/pkp/orcidProfile/blob/main/OrcidProfilePlugin.php#L74

Also, in OMP we would need to able to say which users are volume editors and which are chapter authors: https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/omp-doi-plugin-how-to-export-crossref-xml/49631/30

My understanding is that we can not connect specific Contributor Roles to specific Credit Roles. This is not how it works.

Instead we have a Contributor and we should be able to connect any number of Contributor Roles and Credit Roles to a single Contributor and then have a meaningful way of showing these roles in a) Landing page and b) upstream use.

So basically for example in OMP context a Contributor could be a Chapter Author and a Volume Editor AND have a number of Credit Roles in a specific book.

ORCID has their own taxonomy for contributors that has a more functional approach we could benefit of. They also support Credit. https://info.orcid.org/ufaqs/what-contributor-information-should-i-include-when-adding-works-or-funding-items/

See also: #7223 (comment)

[nils-stefan-weiher]

Hi @ajnyga ,

Separate these two very different ways of using our current role taxonomy: Continue to have the current approach for user permissions BUT create a separate Contributor Role taxonomy just for metadata purposes, something we can map to different metadata schemas (ORCID, Crossref etc.). Basically determine a set of roles that work in most cases, like Author, Chapter Author, Editor, Translator etc.

This is also relevant for the citationStyleLanguage Plugin, because at the moment you have to set up the Contributor roles in the plugin setting specifically to distintiguish translator, chapter authors, etc. as the plugin does not produce correct citations without it.

[ajnyga]

Thanks, yes we have recognized this problem

[asmecher]

@ctgraham raised the issue of degree of contribution. This was also raised in #6395.

CRediT does specify a vocabulary for this, and I suggest we implement it when integrating CRediT into the application.

From CRediT documentation:

Degree of Contribution Optional – Where multiple individuals serve in the same role, the degree of contribution can optionally be specified as ‘lead’, ‘equal’, or ‘supporting’;

[CASRAI-CRedIT]

Subject: Proposal for Integrating CRediT Standard with PKP Library via CredIT Forge

Dear fellow researchers,

We are the Casrai CredIT R&D team writing to propose an innovative solution for the integration of the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) standard within the PKP library, specifically addressing the issues above. As you're aware, accurately recognizing individual contributions is increasingly important in scholarly communications. Our tool, CredIT Forge, leverages the powerful Llama 2 AI model from Meta, trained specifically on contributor taxonomy, to automate and streamline the process of contributor attribution.

Key Features of CredIT Forge:

Automated Taxonomy Contribution: Utilizes Llama 2 AI to intelligently classify and attribute various scholarly contributions based on the CRediT taxonomy. View a web-based individual use case version at https://casrai.org/credit.

Flexible Input & Output Formats: Accepts research summaries in natural language, LaTeX, TikZ, and other metadata, and outputs a comprehensive PDF of the contribution graph and other formats as needed.

Easy Integration: Simple endpoint integration using PHP as illustrated, allowing for quick adoption and scalability within existing PKP infrastructure.

Advantages to the PKP Community:

Standardized Contributions: Ensures a consistent, industry-wide approach to contributor attribution, aligning with the CRediT initiative by CASRAI.

Enhanced Recognition: Provides a detailed, accurate account of each contributor's role, promoting fair and transparent acknowledgment.

Scalability & Support: Designed with future expansion in mind, ensuring the tool remains adaptable and supportive of evolving scholarly communication needs.

While we recognize that ongoing maintenance and updates are not without cost, the unique capabilities and the potential for significant positive impact on the academic community make CredIT Forge a worthwhile investment. As members of the CASRAI community, we are committed to the original taxonomy and its goals of improving research outputs' clarity and usability.

We would be honored to further discuss how CredIT Forge can specifically benefit the PKP community and facilitate a smoother, more integrated approach to adopting the CRediT standard. Our dedicated team is ready to support the integration process and ensure a seamless transition for all stakeholders involved.

For a deeper understanding of our tool and its potential, please visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/CASRAI-CRedIT/CRedIT

Thank you for considering this proposal. We are excited about the possibility of contributing to the PKP library and enhancing the recognition of scholarly contributions through the adoption of CRediT. For any necessary use cases needed before adoption, please reach out to the team, we are working diligently to solve contributor credit taxonomy challenges. We need your help and feedback.

Best Regards,

Gabriel Nieves, CTO
[email protected]
Casrai CredIT Research & Development Team

[TAC-NISO]

To avoid any confusion, the new incarnation of CASRAI is not involved with, nor are they maintainers of the CRediT standard, which was transferred to NISO in 2019. The CRediT standard is published as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy - for a link to the current version: https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit

[CASRAI-CRedIT]

To avoid any confusion, the new incarnation of CASRAI is not involved with, nor are they maintainers of the CRediT standard, which was transferred to NISO in 2019. The CRediT standard is published as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy - for a link to the current version: https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit

Hi,

Thank you for your attention to the developments in the research information management industry. I want to clarify a few points to avoid any confusion and to highlight our ongoing commitment to supporting researchers and institutions.

Firstly, it's important to understand that our organization is dedicated to providing practical, usable tools for the research community. We acknowledge that the CRediT standard is now under the stewardship of NISO, as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and we respect their role in this space. Our focus, however, is on creating solutions that researchers and institutions can directly benefit from.

In our efforts to support the Open Journal Systems (OJS) community, we have developed a service that we believe addresses many of the current needs in research information management. Our interactions with developers, including @asmecher, are aimed at fostering collaboration and integration, though we understand the challenges that come with such endeavors.

We are aware that the incorporation of the CASRAI dictionary of elements into existing systems is complex and might not align with the current development priorities of some platforms. However, our service has been designed to be adaptable and user-friendly, providing a valuable resource for those who choose to utilize it.

As a non-profit organization, we are driven by a mission to serve the research community. The service we provide is free of charge, though it does require significant resources to maintain. We believe in the power of collaboration and shared knowledge, and we invite you and others in the community to explore how our tools can be of benefit.

We understand that discussions about management and standardization are important, but our primary focus is on delivering practical solutions. We encourage you to consider our service as an option in your toolkit. It is designed with the user in mind, aiming to streamline processes and enhance the research information management landscape.

Your consideration of our efforts is greatly appreciated, and we remain open to feedback and collaboration. We are all part of the same community, striving towards the common goal of advancing research and its management.

We have tried to reach out to NISO ad nauseam to no avail. We welcome open communication between our organizations. @asmecher does not want to work with us at this point, we will continue to develop our metadata OJS plugin and provide it free of use on various platforms. For updates on this visit us at casrai.org/credit .

And since we will not go through with our investment into a built in AI CRediT format within OJS codebase, we will not be updating our institution's efforts on this thread.

Best Regards,
Gabriel Nieves
Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information

[jalperin]

It would be great to add a way for users to be able to access the description of the roles from within the UI.

[ajnyga]

You are mostly thinking of the readers and the article landing page, right?

[jalperin]

No, authors entering the information

…

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[ajnyga]

Ok, I can see that it would be beneficial in both use cases.

[asmecher]

I would much rather link out to a 3rd-party resource than duplicate the descriptions inside OJS -- however the https://credit.niso.org/ website is not-great. (And actually kind of broken at the moment -- links contain IP addresses that then redirect to the domain name!) There is no provision for multilingualism e.g. in the URLs.

I'm already not satisfied with maintaining our own files for the translation of terms, and local copies of the descriptions would compound this.

I do see that there's a relatively new repo out there to resolve this outside the plugin and I think that's the right approach (since the NISO CRediT group isn't endorsing an approach to translation). It appears to have both names of roles and descriptions translated -- though there are some key translations missing (e.g. Spanish).

[jalperin]

The first contributors to that repo are our contacts who are coordinating the translation of the plugin. Is the right approach, then, for us to pull in terms and descriptions from that repo?

[asmecher]

We currently get our English list of roles (and main list of URIs) from the jats-schematrons repo, which is included into the CRediT plugin as a submodule. We could also add credit-translation as a submodule.

In addition to a bit of coding, we'd need to move the Spanish translation into that repo (in the required form); ours contains just the CRediT roles, not the descriptions. I don't know if they've got an expression of interest from someone working in Spanish.

[jalperin]

Not sure if they have someone for Spanish. @alexholcombe should be able to answer that.

Would you need to move the Spanish XML list? Or remove it and use the English one in combination with the translation of terms? I note that the URIs in the Spanish one still point to the English-language URIs, and that there are no normalized-term attributes.

[alexholcombe]

About Spanish, we have people working on Spanish, which will be added here, but it will be at least a month before the translation is finished (we have a quality control process involving back-translation and two people contributing).

About the CRediT description text , e.g. "Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims." which is the explanation of what "Conceptualization" means, NISO seems to have no machine-readable way of pulling the description text. About the jats-schematrons repo, we are trying to find out whether there could be recommended approach for getting the text through that, and also implementing the translations.

@CASRAI-CRedIT, thanks for explaining your recent efforts in this space. But when I go to the https://casrai.org/credit link you provided, I'm getting a "404 Not found".

[asmecher]

@jalperin / @alexholcombe, about Juan's earlier suggestion:

It would be great to add a way for users to be able to access the description of the roles from within the UI.

While the credit-translation repo does include space for translations of both roles and descriptions, the jats-schematrons (where we're getting English text and the overall list) only contains English names, not descriptions. And I worry that the translation repo could be quite sensitive to tiny discrepancies between the two.

@alexholcombe, what do you think about changing your repo from using an English-centric structure like (from the German translation)...

{
   "Conceptualization": {
      "description": "Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.",
      "id": "8b73531f-db56-4914-9502-4cc4d4d8ed73",
         "translation": {
         "name": "Konzeptualisierung",
         "description": "Ideen; Formulierung oder Entwicklung der übergeordneten Forschungsziele."
      }
   },
   ...
}

...to instead using a URI-centric structure like this?

{
    "http://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles/conceptualization/": {
        "name": "Konzeptualisierung",
        "description": "Ideen; Formulierung oder Entwicklung der übergeordneten Forschungsziele."
    },
    ...
}

Then the English-language form could also be added as a translation... For example, en.json:

{
    "http://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles/conceptualization/": {
        "name": "Conceptualization",
        "description": "Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims."
    },
    ...
}

...and there could be a single descriptor to list them all (including with IDs, I suppose, though I'm not sure where they're used):

{
    "http://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles/conceptualization/": {
        "id": "8b73531f-db56-4914-9502-4cc4d4d8ed73",
        ...
    },
    ...
}

[marcbria]

I'm already not satisfied with maintaining our own files for the translation of terms, and local copies of the descriptions would compound this.

I was passing by... this thread, just to comment that, I strongly agree in this context.

I mean, that +100 that we do NOT maintain our own translations because this is a standard and there is no provision for our needs to differ from the general ones.

[asmecher]

I've proposed a conversion of the credit-translation repo as described above here: contributorshipcollaboration/credit-translation#22

[kmccurley]

In case you are not aware, crossref has initiated a request for feedback about a proposal for extending CRediT roles. Of course this will remind us that "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from".