Well, am working with some others to submit a paper from a DARPA project to PLoS Computational Biology. And yet again, we have to fill out this form regarding author contributions. And yet again, I am baffled by this. PLoS can be so wise in some areas of publishing. But yet remarkably non creative in others. They ask for you to say which authors "Conceived and designed the experiments" which "Performed the experiments" which "Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools" and which "Analyzed the data" which "Wrote the paper." This has always seemed completely inane to me. First of all, this just does not work for some types of scientific research. Plus it seems so forced and arbitrary.
Why not actually let the authors say who did what in their own words? You can, I note, sort of get around this by badgering the copy editors a bit (e..g, see in my PLoS ONE: Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees where we added some additional categories of "Ideas and discussion" "Built microbial genome database" "Analyzed sequences linked to RecA and RpoB clusters" and "Analysis of distributions of sequences in GOS data."
Why not actually let the authors say who did what in their own words? You can, I note, sort of get around this by badgering the copy editors a bit (e..g, see in my PLoS ONE: Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees where we added some additional categories of "Ideas and discussion" "Built microbial genome database" "Analyzed sequences linked to RecA and RpoB clusters" and "Analysis of distributions of sequences in GOS data."
Even Nature lets the authors use their own words. For example, in my Genomic Encyclopedia paper published with Nature's Creative Commons license for genome papers we wrote:
"D.W. (rRNA analysis, gene families, actin tree, manuscript preparation), P.H. (selection of strains, analysis, manuscript preparation, project coordination), L.G. and D.B. (project management), R.P., B.J.T., E.L., S.G., S.S. (strain curation and growth), K.M., N.N.I., I.J.A., S.D.H., A.P., A.Ly. (annotation, genome analysis), V.K. (CRISPRs, actin), M.W. (whole genome tree), P.D., C.K., A.Z. and M.S. (actin studies), M.N., S.L., J.-F.C., F.C. and E.D. (sequencing), C.H., A.La., M.N. and A.C. (finishing), P.C. (analysis), E.M.R. (manuscript preparation), N.C.K. (selection of strains, annotation, analysis), H.-P.K. (strain selection and growth, DNA preparation, manuscript preparation), J.A.E. (project lead and coordination, analysis, manuscript preparation)."
Which is more useful? I think without a doubt, the constraints by the PLoS system obfuscate what people did. And it is so unnecessary. Here's a public call for PLoS to get rid of this constraint. (I am sure some at PLoS will give me grief for a public call like this, but hey it is the Public Library of Science right?). It seems completely inconsistent with many other aspects of PLoS publishing. Let the author's describe what they did in their own words.
