Nature recently announced changes to their policies on paper authorship (see the ESA article at http://www.esa.org/esablog/?p=1044).  In particular, the reviewed policy demands that each paper name a principal author and that the contributions of each author be outlined.

This move comes after the extraordinary event of a paper being retracted after it came to light that the contributing authors disagreed on the validity of the results.

The move has raised some questions - namely that of trust.  Given the wide range of collaborations that lead to Nature papers, can we not trust that the authors have been professional in their dealings with each other and rigorous in their approach?

Personally, I applaude this decision by Nature.  Publishing a paper in a journal like Science or Nature comes with great prestige and so should also come with great responsibility.  Papers and authors should be recognised for their science should be able to stand up and take ownership, and also responsibility over it.

It is up to the scientific community (us scientists and journal publishers) to ask ourselves what the drivers are for overlooking that one “failure mode” when collating results?  Or the need to give someone an honorary authorship for political reasons.

Science is about publishing results, good bad and indifferent.  Legislation cannot remove the politics from the science, but anything that moves us toward a more open fact based publication of results is a positive move.