I have argued pre­vi­ously that research papers should be posted online at the same time as they are sub­mit­ted to a jour­nal. Some­times peo­ple claim that jour­nals don’t allow it, which is non­sense. Almost every jour­nal allows it, and many also allow the pub­lished ver­sion of a paper to appear on your per­sonal web­site. Today I dis­cov­ered a new tool (thanks to the IMU newslet­ter) which makes it easy to check a journal’s pol­icy on this. Check out SHERPA/​​RoMEO. It’s a very use­ful tool, but who­ever thought SHERPA/​​RoMEO was a good name needs therapy.

With the con­stant pres­sure on aca­d­e­mics to pub­lish research papers, there is a temp­ta­tion for research groups to include “coau­thors” who have not really made any con­tri­bu­tion to the man­u­script. This seems more preva­lent in some fields (e.g., the health sci­ences) than oth­ers. Occa­sion­ally, I am asked to add an author to a paper that has already been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing. I am very reluc­tant to do this as it is hard to imag­ine how some­one could be left off a paper while it goes through sev­eral revi­sions, only to be remem­bered after the paper is accepted. It looks like a last ditch attempt to get some­one a pub­li­ca­tion rather than a gen­uine research con­tri­bu­tion. Most uni­ver­si­ties now have an author­ship pol­icy. The author­ship pol­icy at Monash Uni­ver­sity includes the fol­low­ing state­ments. Attri­bu­tion of author­ship … in all cases author­ship must be based on mak­ing a sub­stan­tial intel­lec­tual con­tri­bu­tion to the work described and tak­ing sole or joint respon­si­bil­ity for that con­tri­bu­tion or, where appro­pri­ate, the work as a whole. Accord­ingly, author­ship must be based upon a sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tion and respon­si­bil­ity for at least one, and usu­ally more than one, of the fol­low­ing activ­i­ties: Con­cep­tion and design of the project; Analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of research data; Draft­ing

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