Our community is committed to communicating research reliably, and the publishers in our community are often at the forefront of initiatives to improve scholarly communications—such as adopting the JATS content model and signing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We looked across our community to identify and highlight publishers who have adopted one such initiative: CRediT, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy.
CRediT is a high-level taxonomy consisting of 14 roles used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.
Recently, the American Speech-Language-Hearing-Association (ASHA) announced that they have implemented CRediT across all five of their journals. In addition to ASHA, publishers in our community who are also collecting contributor roles include Wiley, Elsevier, Mark Allen Healthcare, and Sage. Still others are in earlier stages of adoption or implementation, and have not yet announced adoption. We will continue to monitor and update in this area.
“CRediT is an exciting and well-structured initiative in scholarly publishing,” notes Mike Cannon, Director of Serial Publications and Editorial Services for ASHA. “The opportunity to clearly define and recognize the array of individual contributions to a research project is a powerful one for our discipline, and the level of uptake in our journals is certainly bearing out that value.”
We support standards, and are developing forward looking solutions with them in mind. For example, our Manuscripts authoring platform features the ability to associate contributor roles with each author, and this important subset of author metadata items travel with the manuscript wherever it travels, including to submission and peer review, or preprint servers such as Authorea, for optional inclusion in article metadata and display on published versions.
To learn more about CRediT, please visit https://casrai.org/credit/ or https://credit.niso.org, or email the CRediT Working Group.