Transcript
RSC: Hi I’m Rose Sokol-Chang and I'm the Publisher of the Journals, Books, and Videos Programs at the American Psychological Association. One of the aims of the APA Journals Program is to promote equity through open science. Today I’ll be talking to Katie Witkiewitz of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors about some new initiatives at the journal. It's great to have you, Katie.
KW: Thank you so much Rose. Its great to be here and to promote equity and open science.
RSC: So tell us a little bit about the type of content that you publish in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.
KW: Yeah, great. Our journal is broadly focused on exactly what the title is—the psychology of addictive behaviors. So focusing across the spectrum from alcohol to drugs to behavior addict and then also across the spectrum from policy, prevention, intervention, treatment, epidemiology, and neuroscience. So we kind of cover any psychological factors related to addictive behaviors broadly defined. We cover everything from adolescence to adults to older adults. We don’t have as much animal work. A lot of the animals papers tend to go to Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, which is another APA title
Most of our research tends to be in the human psychology of addictive behaviors. Although we have occasionally published some basic science work.
RSC: One new initiative you rolled out in the journal to promote openness and transparency is the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, which is abbreviated as CRediT. Can you tell us more about CRediT, and specifically—how can prospective authors participate?
KW: Yeah, thanks so much. CRediT is a wonderful idea and initiative to define contributions of authors. Authorship is often a topic—APA obviously provides guidance on how to determine authorship and provides authors with tools and ethical guidelines for following authorship rules and what kind of contribution to a paper should yield authorship. There is guidance around that and yet that has not always been implemented routinely.
So CRediT provides specific contributor roles that different authors might play in a particular manuscript. And our journal and many APA journals are now requiring that authors complete this taxonomy when they submit the paper so that we know that the authors that are on the paper have contributes.
So there are a number of different roles that authors can play. They can play a role in conceptualization of the study. They can play a role in collecting the data, analyzing the data, obtaining the funding, in conducting the study, in preparing the manuscript itself (the original draft or reviewing and editing). Or even validation or visualization or providing resources to the authorship team. So there’s many roles that authors can play in a paper and the CRediT system is a way of attaching specific roles to specific authors.
RSC: One thing I like about the article that introduced CRediT is they also talk about the responsibilities of authors after publication. We don’t always think about that—if an article needs to be corrected or if data need to be examined, there’s still work that happens after the publication, and I like that it highlights that.
KW: Definitely, and it’s so critical for us to be thinking about that. And I see that now as an editor of a journal—you see the process of a manuscript being accepted for publication and then appearing in a journal and then all of a sudden there are corrections or there are questions about the data transparency, or another article comes out that questions the rigor or reproducibility of some of the analyses. How do we identify who is most responsible? Obviously we would always get in touch with the corresponding author, but For those authors who forget who did what would provide a record of who contributed what to a particular paper
RSC: Very true. How do you think credit contributes to equity in the publication process?
KW: I think it's wonderful for promoting equity in the publication process. Being in academia and in academic psychology, there’s horror stories of authors being added to papers that they did not contribute to, or authors that contributed more and didn’t get the authorship level. So it actually forces the corresponding author to think about the contributions and apply a role to each of the contributing author and really requires thoughtfulness around what authors contributed to a particular paper and how can I assign them a role in this paper.
So it makes it not just an automatic add on—person automatically added on to a paper by being a senior person in a lab or department—it requires that the corresponding author actually specifies the role that the person played.
That’ll help in reducing ethical violations with respect to authors roles and potentially increase equity of corresponding authors potentially thinking about someone who was potentially left off author string who should have been included on the authors string and as they go through those contributor roles they will hopefully identify and give them the appropriate authorship credit that they deserve. Of course, it still relies on the corresponding author. We can't know at the journal what transpired, and we rely on the corresponding author to provide an honest reporting of those contributor roles. There's only so much that we can do at the journal level to try to increase equity, to try to make sure that author contributions are fairy noted, and this is one way of approaching that, I think.
RSC: Yeah I think it’s a good contribution—as you said we can only do so much but it's important to have that accurate scientific record and know that we can correct if needed, but it’s nice to know up front who plays what role.
KW: Yes, definitely. I think it will also really help authorship disputes down the road, or wanting to add an author or remove the authors. This makes that process more transparent. If an author is removed, they would have to justify why that happened given their initial contributor role. If an author is added, they’d also have to be assigned a contributor role to the paper. It also provides a little bit of guidance for how to include or remove authors based on their contributor roles to the manuscript.
Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
KW: Thank you for having me! This is such a great initiative and I’m so glad APA Journals is implementing the CREDIT taxonomy and I look forward to authors are using it at Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.
RSC: Likewise; thank you for being an early adopter.
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How does one define the “author” of a study? Historically, an author of an article was the person who both conducted the research and wrote the manuscript. Today, journals are increasingly recognizing that authors are not only those who do the writing but also those who contribute to the study. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)opens in new window, a high-level taxonomy comprised of 14 roles that describe each author’s specific contribution(s) to a given piece of scholarly output, is instrumental in defining and tracking author contributions.