AUTHORSHIP: THE COINS OF THE REALM,
THE SOURCE OF COMPLAINTS
Linda Wilcox
Harvard Medical School, 164 Longwood Ave, Room 304, Boston, MA 02115, USA
The growing importance of authorship to funding and career advancement has led to speculation that authorship disputes are increasing. This is verified by the rising incidence of intellectual property disputes brought to the Ombuds Office over a 5-year period from faculty, trainees, and students of Harvard's medical, dental, and public health schools. The Ombuds Office opened in 1991 and provides a confidential alternative to formal grievance procedures. Generic data are kept to provide upward feedback to the organization. Issues involving authorship, ownership, and professional misconduct are a rapidly growing portion of complaints, rising from 2% in 1991 to 11% in 1996 of the approximately 500 concerns reaching the Ombudsperson yearly. Overall, 53% of these types of complaints came from faculty, 26% came from trainees, while students and others comprised the remainder. Over the past 2 years, 100 people brought forward intellectual property issues. One fourth of these were from international visitors (faculty, fellows, and students). Their issues approximated those of the general population with the exception of concerns about ownership and plagiarism. The most often discussed issues are who owns what, what can be taken from a lab when leaving, and how to cite the works of others. Combining both US and international cases, most people (76%) are concerned about ownership, recognition for contribution of work, authorship inclusion, and authorship position. Common authorship dilemmas include "I'm leaving. How will I ensure credit for further work using my contribution?" "My paper has been sitting on my supervisor's desk for 6 months. It needs to be read." and "Though an author, I never inspected the article, never saw the reviews, and never signed off on it." More serious professional misconduct concerns comprise the remaining 24% of complaints. Rudimentary institutional best practice would include alerting every potential author to the ethical expectations for the research institution, as well as institutional self-monitoring.
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