Fostering a Culture of Openness and Transparency with Institutional Authorship Policies

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Collaboration and co-authorship are essential for establishing credit and accountability in science, and co-authorship disputes and unethical behavior related to it are a growing concern. Moreover, authorship disputes are often asymmetrical in terms of the relative power of those involved, systematically disadvantaging some parties in the dispute. This project is a multi-year intervention study designed to test the efficacy of institutional authorship policies and ethical authorship training for promoting ethical authorship practices and improving perceptions of research culture and climate across STEM disciplines at research universities. An institutional authorship policy will be developed and publicized at a research university, and an experimental test will be used to the effectiveness of different forms of the intervention for encouraging STEM trainees and faculty to complete quality authorship agreements, and for improving their perceptions of ethical authorship practices and the institutional research culture. This research will produce a model institutional authorship policy based on best practices that can be used by other institutions, new training materials for educating researchers about ethical authorship, and open-source materials to facilitate the implementation of open cultures of research and authorship practices at research-intensive institutionsThe project develops and tests the effects of a campus-wide institutional authorship policy to assess its effects on ethical authorship practices and improving perceptions of ethical research climates. To do so, an institutional authorship policy will be created and educational tools regarding the policy and ethical authorship practices are designed. STEM doctoral and post-doctoral trainees are then recruited to complete an authorship agreement with their research advisor. Participants are randomly assigned to a low-engagement or high-engagement treatment and surveys would be administered to experimentally test the relative effects of each training approach on the completion of quality authorship agreements and perceptions of institutional authorship practices and ethical culture. This project results in generalizable evidence about the effectiveness of different engagement strategies for encouraging researchers to adopt ethical processes for determining authorship and if institutional efforts to address authorship ethics can improve the institutional climate for authorship and research ethics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.