POLICY ON FAIRNESS OF AUTHORSHIP CREDIT IN
COLLABORATIVE FACULTY-STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
October 8, 1998
The Graduate Council of the Faculties has unanimously approved a new policy on authorship credit in collaborative faculty-student publications. The intent of the policy is to avoid situations in which graduate students or faculty feel that their contribution to published work has not been fairly recognized. Our intent in the distribution of this policy statement to faculty and graduate students is to make authorship discussions a routine part of conversations about intellectual collaboration.
Why is a policy needed?
2. Faculty members are almost always directly involved in the student's scholarly work as mentors, employers, collaborators, or consultants.
3. When publications emerge from collaborative faculty-student effort, it is not always clear who should be given authorship credit, and in what order the authors' names should appear on the published work.
4. The Vice Provost, the Council of Graduate Deans and the Graduate Council of the Faculties have been made aware over the years that there is widespread uncertainty among graduate students about what constitutes fair practices for the determination of authorship. Practices vary widely between and within departments at Penn.
5. Graduate students are understandably reluctant to raise issues of authorship at the beginning of projects, and skeptical about the efficacy of raising issues once the work has been completed. Students feel that authorship credit is a difficult issue to raise, because their questioning of the arrangements can be interpreted as a challenge to the mentor on whom the student depends for intellectual and/or financial support as well as future letters of recommendation.
6. The lack of clarity concerning fairness in authorship is evident not only among graduate students. Faculty members, too, are often uncertain about fair practices. Some feel that their intellectual and written contribution to a student's published work has not been sufficiently acknowledged.
7. As part of their appropriate professional education, young scholars need to learn about how questions of joint-authorship are decided. Guidelines can facilitate discussions between students and their faculty mentors which further such learning.
In considering the task of formulating a university-wide policy on Fairness in Authorship Credit, the Graduate Council of the Faculties is aware that different traditions of joint authorship exist in different disciplines and departments.
In light of the variability, ambiguity, and uncertainty regarding faculty-student authorship of published work, there are no specific rules that can be enunciated by the Graduate Council of the Faculties that will address the situation in all departments and academic disciplines. Instead, the Graduate Council of the Faculties is mandating a set of processes within each graduate group that will clarify expectations concerning authorship for each student and faculty member.
A. Graduate Group level
Graduate groups must publish and publicize general guidelines concerning authorship and make them available to all graduate students. (Graduate Group policies are available at the end of this document.)
B. Faculty-Student level
Individual mentors should conform to the graduate group policy on authorship credit. Mentors are responsible for anticipating possible disagreements concerning authorship credit regarding specific collaborative projects and should initiate clarifying discussions before students have invested substantial time on such projects. These discussions should be reopened if relative contributions change.
C. Appeals process
No policy can prevent the occurrence of all instances of actual or perceived unfair treatment. Although inequities can occur to either faculty or graduate students, we believe that graduate students are usually more vulnerable to faculty practices and less able to take action when they feel that fairness has been violated.
In cases of disagreements about authorship the following steps should be taken:
2. If the disagreement is not resolved to all participants' satisfaction, an appeal can be made to the Dean of the School, who should convene a committee of faculty and graduate students to hear the disagreement and attempt to resolve it. Cases will be decided in the context of the published norms and guidelines of the graduate group.