Trends in global research pointed to a more open research environment in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, partially due to a push for collaboration among countries and scientists (on the part of organizations such as the World Health Organization), efforts to make research more open have been further amplified.
The areas where open science has already had a huge and lasting impact include authorship and peer review models. Shared authorship in collaborative science continues to be a growing trend; articles with many authors are now conventional, with the number of authors on an average manuscript increasing in the last five years. There is also a persistent move toward more open and collaborative peer review. The Technica staff has written in the past about this growing trend of open peer review.
In the United States, research hubs have expanded beyond the cities where they were commonplace for many years (e.g., New York and Boston), and we are seeing an increase in international collaborations. In addition to a push for collaboration by health organizations and other stakeholders, international collaboration can be attributed to the growing accessibility of open research, mobility of researchers, and the availability of new funding streams. These funding streams may include government agencies, venture capital, and/or corporate research and development.
In 2019, the National Science Foundation reported that one out of five research articles had authors from more than one country. This growth in international collaborations has been steady over the last 10 to 20 years as countries that were small producers of scientific publications have accelerated their global publication output.
During a keynote talk at the ISMTE North America Virtual Event, Annette Flanagin of JAMA Network reported that in a study of authorship in major medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, and New York Journal of Medicine) from 2005 to 2015, the total number of authors increased from 8 to 18 per article, and authors with group authorship increased from 17% to 45% per year.
A shift toward group authorship in research publications disseminates information to a broader public, in part because a diverse group of colleagues helps distribute information more widely. Additional benefits of group authorship include enabling the creation of large data sets that can be used to address scientific questions, the ability to integrate multiple perspectives into a study, and growth and expansion of research networks.
But group authorship does not happen without hurdles. Flanagin explained that group authorship typically includes “many contributors to team science projects, multicenter trials, research networks, working groups, or consensus/guidelines panels.” Research groups can include hundreds of participants, but not all will qualify as authors.
Some members of the scientific community argue that while collaborative science can lead to higher-impact publications, most authors possess biases regarding their level of contribution to a scientific collaborative work. Biased perceptions can cause both frustration and complications within collaborative work. Therefore, in order to address author bias, finding fair ways to determine the relative contribution of each coauthor and considering different models for allocating credit are significant steps toward addressing the issue.
Some proponents of transparency of authors’ contributions hold the perspective that journal authorship policies and procedures should be changed to provide insight into the contributions of each author.
How do you feel about a move towards large group authorship? Do you believe that this increased collaboration can lead to a more open research environment in publishing? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
