Since 2014, the contributor taxonomy – otherwise known as CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) has been widely adopted across a range of publishers to improve accessibility and visibility of the range of contribution to published research outputs, bringing a number of important and practical benefits to the research ecosystem more broadly, including:
- Helping to reduce the potential for author disputes.
- Supporting adherence to authorship/contributorship processes and policies.
- Enabling visibility and recognition of the different contributions of researchers, particularly in multi-authored works – across all aspects of the research being reported (including data curation, statistical analysis, etc.)
- Support identification of peer reviewers and specific expertise.
- Support grant making by enabling funders to more easily identify those responsible for specific research products, developments or breakthroughs.
- Improving the ability to track the outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients.
- Easy identification of potential collaborators and opportunities for research networking.
- Further developments in data management and nano-publication.
- Inform ‘science of science’ (‘meta-research) to help enhance scientific efficacy and effectiveness.
- Enable new indicators of research value, use and re-use, credit and attribution.