CRediT came from this idea that we have a lot of different kinds of contributions in research, and this was something that people like Eugene Garfield were already discussing since the seventies and eighties. But capturing all kinds of contributions with authorship is kind of ludicrous; you want to be as inclusive as possible, but somewhere, somehow, you have to draw a line.

This is when ethicists and philosophers came in, because it's all about where and how to draw a line that will ultimately include some and exclude the rest. That demarcation is a very difficult process, because it involves deeming some tasks and some roles less credit-worthy.

There were people who were like, “We can look at how other contexts to acknowledge specific contributions. For instance, let's look at movies. Let's think about scientific authorship as movie credits, where you have all kinds of contributions that are listed at the end of the movie.” So people were sort of dancing around this idea of making attributions a little bit more specific, but very quickly they realized that authorship has a different meaning in different contexts. Authorship in the context of movies or arts is a completely different phenomenon compared with authorship in sciences. Even within specific scientific disciplines, authorship has different requirements. It became pretty obvious that following what happens in movies is not exactly a good idea.

Another challenge was that in science, authorship is not just a way to give people credit and hold them accountable; it's also a means by which people can apply for another job or get a promotion. We have all kinds of indices that collect people's previous authorship and contributions to research, so we wanted something where contributions can be tallied. And in order to have something that can be tallied, we needed a standard. Because if Person X is involved in collecting data for a project, when X works in another project that also involves data collection, those describing these two projects might use different terms, different verbiage, for X’s contribution. Accordingly, it would be difficult to tally X’s contributions after a year or two, so we needed to use standard vocabularies, across all kinds of publications, to be able to tally, to track, who has done what in relation to research.

In the middle of all of this, there was this group of people who took this as an opportunity to develop CRediT. People like Liz Allen, Amy Brand, and Simon Kerridge organized a workshop in 2012 at Harvard where they invited experts in authorship. They analyzed the contributions as they were reported in more than 100,000 papers, and identified the roles that are most commonly used in life and health sciences. The group went over the list of contributions, and they came up with the fourteen roles.That was the start of CRediT.

Since then, there's been all kinds of views about how this has changed or not changed some of the ethical issues that we were already struggling with, but overall, the reception from the community has been very positive. We have seen more than a thousand journals that have adopted this and are using CRediT every day, and we are also seeing more awareness from researchers, from all kinds of disciplines, about CRediT and how it can affect the process of scholarly publications and communication.

I've experienced the insufficiencies of authorship—I think we all have—and we know how hard demarcation of authors is in textual scholarship. Ground Works is different; it relies on multimedia and artful forms of production to explain the work that we're doing. So it becomes even murkier to explain how authoring knowledge is taking place. While CRediT gives us a framework to talk about who's helping this knowledge come to life and be in the world, we also saw a challenge in that CRediT is steeped in the sciences. And so it doesn't fully recognize in its current form the artful and designerly ways that knowledge gets produced, and the other work that happens to get it out there, and to make connections to communities. I just want to acknowledge that CRediT is amazing in the way that it's been adopted and is the standard, and that we were seeing an opportunity to expand that a little bit to fit our work.

Creating Knowledge in Common started at the same time as when we were starting to explore CRediT, so we were able to design these two things together. Creating Knowledge in Common was trying to really look at the broader forms of contributorship and participation with communities, and that gave us a lovely moment to think with authors, or contributors, as well as the special collection editors. How do we fully capture the range of things going on within those projects?

(Our slide deck was a helpful visual aid during the webinar, and we include select slides here.)

We refined and synthesized the fourteen CRediT roles, and expanded the taxonomy to eighteen roles in CRediT-FAIR (Figure 1). We renamed “Software” as “Production – Technical,” and then we added the categories “Production – Creative” and “Production – Social.” We were trying to really capture the work of producing arts-based research—that it spans the technical, the creative, and the social—as well as activities like relationship development that sustain that work, so we added “Relationship Development and Outreach.” We also added a category called “Reflective Analysis” which was a nice counterpart to “Formal Analysis,” to acknowledge other forms of critical review that come from arts- and design-based processes.

We did retain as much of the original CRediT taxonomy as possible to honor the work that Mohammad and his collaborators had put into producing the standard. So for example, in CRediT-FAIR, roles like “Conceptualization” and “Funding Acquisition” are identical to how they appear in CRediT (Figure 2).

In some instances, we thought the language of CRediT emphasized scientific approaches and STEM culture, and we felt there was a need to broaden that to include the arts. So in our desciption of the role “Formal Analysis” (Figure 3), we removed the terms “statistical” and “mathematical,” allowing a bit more room for other formal methods to be in there.

In other instances, we added language (Figure 4). We expanded “Investigation” to include “inquiry.” That was to acknowledge inquiry as a form of investigation that is important for arts-integrative work. And we expanded the definition to include research through, with, and for arts and design—to make sure that the arts is situated within this role.

And then we get into the roles we created to accommodate Ground Works and arts-integrative research. We added “Production – Creative” (Figure 5) to acknowledge the work that goes into artistic, creative, or design production. Another addition is “Reflective Analysis” (Figure 6). As I mentioned, this is designed as a counterpoint to formal analysis, recognizing the ways that artists and creative practitioners reflect upon and create insight from within their work. The third one we added was around social production (Figure 7). We saw it as important to not just recognize the work of producing arts, but also the whole range of contributions that are often involved in situated environments and particularly community-based collaborations, and in arts-integrative work. The final one is kind of a counterpoint to that social production and also an expansion of the existing role of project administration: “Relationship Development and Outreach” (Figure 8).

We hope that this is a productive expansion, one that spurs conversation about the ways that CRediT might meet broader communities and also include a recognition of arts- and design-based research and knowledge production.

The question of implementing this contributorship model for our special issue was a really easy “yes”; it was already in accord with how we were thinking about the special issue. And I very much appreciate that as other articles not associated with Creating Knowledge in Common come in, those authors who may not even be thinking about community partnered work will now be explicitly invited to ask questions about contributorship, through lenses that we developed in the context of community-partnered work.

I just want to say a bit more about the goals of Ground Works, since I've been here since the beginning, and explain why adopting this model makes sense for Ground Works and for arts-integrated research more broadly.

We really founded Ground Works to meet a need for documenting and presenting arts-integrative research in a way that puts an emphasis on process, to invite people to think conceptually about their process. Because so many times when arts integrative work pops up in universities, it’s with almost no critical reflection; it’s celebrated only for the fact that it did something new. Or institutions ask creators of arts-integrative work to talk about process in ways that feel like they're asking them to justify themselves.

With Ground Works, we wanted to push folks to clarity about how they do arts-integrated work in a way that is emboldening, and that grows their own appreciation and knowledge of their own work.

Among the stakes of doing that well are how collaborators in arts-integrative work navigate power differentials and asymmetries. Often in this work, expertise is not valued or recognized or even compensated rightly. A very common negative example of how arts-integrative research happens on campuses is that an artist/designer is asked by a scientist or engineer at the last minute of a project to come in and add a little creativity to the way it's presented, to make it seem more interdisciplinary, or special. And that's not a good recognition of the differing power positions that these folks come to in those situations, or of the differing expertise that they bring. With community-partnered work, that's only going to be amplified. You've got folks in not only very different positions of power, but within relationships that are embedded in decades, if not much longer, of problematic relationships between universities and the communities in which they're physically located. These relationships are often characterized by exploitative relationships in which researchers have behaved in extractive ways toward their community neighbors.

So it was a very easy translation here for a platform already thinking about equity in the context of contributorship to arts-integrative work, to think about it in the context of arts-integrative community-partnered work.

I’d like to paint a picture of how CRediT-FAIR worked in real life.

We did this huge, hugely collaborative project across disciplines in both the arts and the sciences. We had a photographer, landscape designers; we had biologists and ecologists and social scientists, anthropologists all working together on this exhibition with three communities. And we really did try to work together as closely as possible.

We had thirteen people that ended up in the official authorship role, and then we had another nineteen people that were in the CRediT-FAIR acknowledgments. And then we have a kind of an asterisk at the byline, acknowledging the three communities that we worked with.

This is a cross-cultural project as well; it's in Peru. And as Kevin was alluding to, this is one example of a situation that very often happens, especially in Peru, where Western-based researchers go to a country that doesn't have a lot of resources. They do their fancy collaboration with the local professionals and community members, go back, and write an article where nobody else gets acknowledged except for the U.S. people, and they feel like they can do that because they're the ones writing the article. It's in English, and they did the majority of the work. They got the funding. But it doesn't acknowledge the fact that they couldn't have done anything if they didn't partner with all of those people down there, and it doesn't acknowledge the different types of knowledge that were required to be able to carry out this work, including the lived knowledge of community members that is so critical.

So when we were going through this CRediT-FAIR system, we identified all of the different ways that people interacted with the project. The way that we were able to determine who became an author and who didn’t, was if you had two or more ways of contributing, then you were included as an author 1 (sidenote: Mohammad Hosseini replied to this: The people who have designed CRediT have specifically highlighted that it should not be used to specify who is an author and who is not. That's because the CRediT roles do not neatly align with the roles that are sometimes required by authorship guidelines. And there are roles in the CRediT taxonomy that are specifically asked not to be given authorship credit. For instance, the task of Funding Acquisition is one of the fourteen roles in the initial CRediT taxonomy, yet the most widely accepted authorship guidelines suggest specifically that funding acquisition alone does not make you an author. At the end of the day it shouldn't be used as criteria or as a tool to determine who should be an author and who should not be. ↩ ) . We tried really, really hard to get the communities as authors, because when I actually went through the CRediT-FAIR system, they had way more than two contributions. We just couldn't figure out the literal logistics of doing that because there's silly things like you need an email address. It's hard to have a community versus a person. So we finally landed on this kind of medium way of acknowledging, where we put it right up front and said, Look, we see these communities as authors (Figure 9).

Because I'm the project manager and I work with everybody, in different capacities, I went through that first step of trying to figure out who contributed in what way for CRediT-FAIR. I then sent it out and some people tweaked their contributorship in different ways; some people added, oh, I actually did work on this, I did work on that.

I really love the way that this is laid out both by people and then by task (Figures 10 and 11), so that you can see who works together.

Unfortunately, except for one institution, University of Glasgow, no university has incorporated CRediT into their tenure and evaluation process. Because it hasn't been picked up and it hasn't been implemented, the real life, long-term impact of CRediT on people's careers is still minimal.

For our Peruvian professionals, though, it really will make the difference to for promotion and their careers, being published in English, and open-access in a place they can show their colleagues. That will have a direct financial impact. I know it does for all of the folks who work in academia, but for them especially it is incredible the amount of difference that it makes.

Yes, for a lot of local communities involved in research projects, having their contributions recognized in a standard way could help them, for instance, applying for grants in the future or just putting their name on the map. Without it, their name is only mentioned in the body of the text, and if the journal is not open access, that mention is not going to get you anywhere because it is behind a paywall and no one's going to be able to index it. Then that community would still remain sort of hidden, whereas if they are in the acknowledgement section or the authorship byline, then they are given a kind of credit that makes them much more findable. That allows other groups to reach out to them, that allows them to apply for funding. These are some of the more long-term benefits for such communities.

It's a manifestation of justice. If we have Person X who did data curation, we don't want Person Y to take credit for their work. That's one part of it, but I mean, recognition is one of the things that we greatly care about, and just having our contribution recognized is in and of itself very important.

It's long been understood in research about methodologies of arts-integrative research that talking early on in a collaboration about what you each want to get from it, what your goals are, and how you want to be recognized supports more reflective, intentional process. And that results in better work.

It did help with authorship order for us, too, going through that CRediT-FAIR system. But it also was deeply reflective for us, to realize that there were so many pieces to the project to begin with; it wasn't just a thing that we did over three years that popped out at the end with this product, this paper or whatever. The process was actually the value as well.

Yes, one of the best ways to avoid tension around authorship is to have conversations early about authorship or about contributions, and CRediT has been suggested as a solution for that. There's also an app called Tenzing. It's basically like an excel sheet where you can put up names of people and list their specific contributions, just to make sure that everybody in the project knows whose responsibility it is, for instance, to curate the data or to write the first version of the manuscript.

One problem is that early conversations are going to become less relevant as the project proceeds. People may join the project, people might get sick, people might relocate; all kinds of things can happen during the process. So we need not just early conversations, we need frequent conversations.