Authorship Policy

[wwieder]

Somewhere in our documentation I feel we should discuss expectations for authorship.

Major releases

• Everyone who contributes to major releases of the code will be included on model documentation papers (e.g. the CLM5 paper).
• Papers using major release versions of the code should reference the paper and code used in the overview paper (e.g. Lawrence et al. 2019)

Minor releases & other development code

Should acknowledge contributions from scientists and software engineers who helped develop this code.

Broadly, we're hoping that authorship discussions are:

• Explicit & Early in project. (Talk to people early and often when you're starting a project
• Inclusive
• Consider:
  • How integral contributions are to the science being presented
  • Career stage
  • Job categories
  • Contributions on external repositories or resources?
  • Time commitment or effort of contributors
• Recognize that model developers may not have published initial results from their code yet

Additional considerations:

• It's the responsibility of authors to communicate project ideas the LWMG co-chair
• It's the responsibility of the LMWG co-chairs to know about potential contributors who should be consider for authorship and help navigate conflict in potentially overlapping papers.
• We should advocate for each other, appreciating that not everyone knows who actually contributed to projects

More resources:

In thinking about a more formal authorship policy, we can potentially draw inspiration from the following sources:

• CSEG development policies
• FATES example, thanks @ckoven
• JULES example, thanks Anna Harper
• NutNet example (with a rubric!), thanks @katierocci