I think in the future if I am ever writing a code paper...

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I think in the future if I am ever writing a code paper I am just going to take the list of contributors and copy paste that into the authors list with links to a git blame (with consent). If we're going to have a credit assignment system as broken as authorship, we can at least err on the "include everyone" side of the brokenness - I want the person who submits a PR to fix a typo in the docs to get credit for helping. People being incentivized to make lots of little contributions is good, actually.

It should be the same way with regular papers too - put your lab techs and undergrads on the paper! Put on the grad student/postdoc who isnt explicitly assigned to this project but ends up helping out anyway. Its literally free! Authorship inflation is a made up problem thats not even a problem!

Like 2 Oct 2023 at 18:01 | Open on neuromatch.social

5 comments

extreme organic gay

@jonny this is good, but it might be easier just to take your name off the paper if you're going to be a lazy fuck 😂

2 Oct 2023 at 18:04 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Dr. Robert M Flight

@jonny I've seen a couple of people do this previously, if I remember C. Titus Brown did so, and took a lot of flack from some corners for it at the time. I'd hope that attitudes have changed, especially around software. But yeah, in general we need to be more open about offering authorship for any kind of contribution to the project.

2 Oct 2023 at 20:34 | Open on mastodon.social

Dr. jonny phd

@rmflight
Ya I have very little patience for the culture of hierarchy that says what kind of work "counts" as a "substantial intellectual contribution" and think its p much exclusively used to gatekeep.

3 Oct 2023 at 0:02 | Open on neuromatch.social

Stephan Saalfeld

@jonny 100% to the general sentiment, but like every lazy system, this incentivizes unwanted behavior, i.e. to maximize coauthorship through mundane contributions that perfectly follow protocol.

3 Oct 2023 at 12:42 | Open on mastodon.social

Dr. jonny phd

@herrsaalfeld
I dont see why thats unwanted. If the changes are helpful and get merged, what do I care that the person is also helpful to 1000 other projects in a small way? That seems like good behavior to encourage. Its the fault of authorship being a broken metric that it cant distinguish size of contribution, and heightening that contradiction rather than discouraging collaboration to fit it also is a good thing

3 Oct 2023 at 18:03 | Open on neuromatch.social