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The writing on the wall

In the nineteen sixties, the French critical theorist Roland Barthes wrote an influential essay, Death of the Author (Barthes, 1967). He was not concerned with scholarly communication as such, but the title resonates nonetheless. I first cited the piece some years ago when discussing suggestions made by a number of distinguished journal editors that the concept of the author should be “retired”: what was required, they felt, was a way of itemizing the contributions made by all those involved in the research work being reported so that the reader, or a promotion and tenure committee for that matter, could reasonably determine whose finger had been in which part of the pie (Cronin, 2001). Such an approach would improve both transparency and accountability and also strengthen public trust in science at a time when stories of fraud in the news media were becoming disturbingly prevalent. Common sense suggests that as the number of collaborators involved in a project increases, responsibility for the work is distributed more thinly across team members (atomization), equity is diluted (individuals have less ownership of the project), accountability is diffused (raising issues of quality assurance) and, as a consequence, the potential for human error increases (see Figure 1). There is little doubt that the very real benefits of collaborative research sometimes come at a price. Authorship is a deceptively complicated construct, once unpacked: an author may be a named individual (James Joyce wrote Ulysses), choose to be anonymous (Primary Colors was written by Joe Klein but published anonymously), use a pseudonym (George Eliot’s pen name was Mary Ann Evans) or write under a collective pseudonym (e.g., Nicolas Bourbaki was in fact a group of 20th century French mathematicians). An author may be an organization (e.g., the OECD), a tight-knit research team, or a massive, distributed collaboration, as in in rarefied world of highenergy physics (Grim, 2009). When it comes to Big Science, and indeed science generally, the lone author is a dying breed. Co-authorship is increasingly the norm and papers with dozens, scores or even hundreds of authors are commonplace. Many hands make light work, but they also make the allocation of credit intractably difficult at times. We have entered the age of fractionalized authorship and nano publication. Who did what? What constitutes a publication? How should credit (and kudos) be distributed? Even well intentioned guidelines relating to the role of authors and contributors such as those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors can hope to achieve only so much in terms of standardization. Speaking on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Peter Higgs and François Englert in 2013, Michael Turner, President of the American Physical Society, made the following observation: “Discoveries more and more involve a village. It took 10,000 people and $10 billion and 20 years to build the instrument that made this discovery, and you’d be hard pressed to narrow that group down even to 100, let alone to three” (Turner, 2013). Turner makes a good point. To his credit, the laureate Peter Higgs laments the fact that the boson particle has been named after him because it backgrounds the contributions of the sundry others who played a part in the breakthrough. The quite natural human urge to eponymize such discoveries reinforces the Great Man model of scientific progress, airbrushing the many out of the picture. In any case, it is not only major discoveries that involve a village; large swathes of the published scientific literature these days seem to involve village-sized teams of diverse capabilities. It is true that when it comes to dishing out awards we run the risk of distorting the historical record by oversimplifying what are often complicated and messy narratives, but the alternative may be no better. When there are hundreds of collaborators and authors, measuring individual contributions and divvying up credit in equitable fashion become horrendously difficult, not to mention futile tasks—akin to counting angels on a pinhead. Of course, these days that sort of thing is grist to the bibliometrician’s ever-busier mill (Cronin & Sugimoto, 2015). And then there is the not so