Scope
- This policy covers who is included as an author. Ordering, shared firsts, and/or shared anchors are decided separately.
- Exceptions are decided by all lead members of the project in question, with the reasoning written down.
Who qualifies
- A member is included if the project would have been meaningfully different - in terms of direction, results, presentation, implementation progress, etc. - without their direct contribution.
- Every listed author must be able to explain the work as a whole and must approve the final manuscript.
Who doesn’t qualify
- Volume of small tasks does not substitute for a contribution that changed or meaningfully pushed ahead the work. A member who performs isolated, easily replaceable tasks is acknowledged rather than listed.
- Taking on a task creates an expectation of finishing it or handing it off in time for someone else to. A member who blocks the project and then contributes minimally at the end does not thereby qualify.
- Late-stage additions qualify only if they altered the results, the argument, or the presentation in a way the project needed.
- The lead members of a project should raise concerns about a member’s contribution while the work is ongoing, not at submission. Nobody should first learn at submission that their contribution was viewed as thin.
Risk sharing across a direction
- Project outcomes are partly luck. A member whose project fails for reasons other than their own irresponsibility, for example a convincing negative result or an approach that turns out to be a dead end, is included on one most closely related paper in the same direction, in recognition of the contribution their work made to that direction.
- This applies when the failed effort informed the surviving work, including by ruling out an approach, producing tooling, or sharpening the framing.
- It does not apply when the project failed through abandonment, unreliability, or failure to communicate.
- A member who has left the project or team retains this claim on work already underway when they left.