Bids-specification: RFC: Maintainer/Steering credit on BEP papers

[effigies]

When BEPs result in papers, there's some question as to how to provide credit to the BIDS community beyond the contributors to the BEP. The BIDS steering group and maintainers group do important work that enables BEPs, at times including direct contributions to the BEP effort. However, having a list of 6+ (currently 9) mandatory co-authors might be a bit excessive.

We propose the following convention: Each paper should have a member of the maintainers and steering group on it. By default, this should be the lead maintainer (currently @sappelhoff) and the steering group chair (currently @guiomar). If another member of either group takes a significant lead in landing the BEP, then that member would become the representative author for the group. If multiple members of either group put in a significant effort, then the number can be increased.

No particular threshold is proposed for "significant effort" or "significant lead".

If there are no objections, this could go in DECISIONMAKING.md or any other document where it seems appropriate.

cc @bids-standard/steering @bids-standard/bep_leads

[yarikoptic]

Some publication venues (and pubmed) support collective author entity grouping multiple lesser contributors into a single entity. Eg see scipy paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0686-2 with SciPy 1.0 Contributors . So there could be similar BIDS Steering Group which could include everyone who actively participated in steering the BEP through its life time

[effigies]

I would support using a collective entity for each of the steering group and maintainers group, when the venue permits.

[guiomar]

Thanks Chris! I also think having a collective entity for the steering group and the maintainers group would be a very good idea.

[francopestilli]

@yarikoptic @effigies I agree this is a good recent trend. I personally do like papers with hundreds of authors' names in the appendix instead of simply a branded name to a group (SicPic 1.0 Contributors or DIPY contributors). In the short term, it is possible to track down the group of individuals that that brand refers to. Yet, in the longer term, it becomes almost impossible to reconstruct who contributed to that paper because the actual name is not associated with the paper. So, in the long term, only a few names in the paper get credit. I think this is a solution that works better for the editors/journals (limiting the number of pages) than for the authors/contributors. Physics projects continue with hundreds of names in the appendix, that is because it is understood that those names actually contributed and should be published with the description of the work.

My two cents!

[guiomar]

Also agree with this.

[yarikoptic]

@francopestilli " in the appendix instead of simply a branded name to a group (SicPic 1.0 Contributors or DIPY contributors)."

appendix is not indexed etc, so even worse than "Acknowledgement" section within paper for acknowledging reciprocal contribution to the "works". A Collective name becomes a part of the bibliographic record, discoverable and indexed. I have discovered about my inclusion on scipy paper IIRC on pubmed, while establishing COI list for NSF using @poldrack 's IIRC script (had to tune it... yet to share my changes, heh heh)