Genome Publication Strategy

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Further question... awaiting reply.

-- 
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
      Pippa Wells, Div EP, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland.
      Telephone 78179 or 73839 (External +41 22 76 78179 or 73839)
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 14:09:54 +0100 (CET)
From: Pippa Wells <pippa@mail.cern.ch>
Reply-To: Pippa Wells <Pippa.Wells@cern.ch>
To: Gos Micklem <gos@gen.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: genome publications


Dear Gos

Thanks for that information - it was exactly the sort of thing I was 
looking for. The typical size of our collaborations up to now has been 
several hundred authors, but not quite as many as 1000. The experiments 
starting in 2007 will have nearly 2000 collaborators. The present practice 
is to print the names and institutes of all members of the collaboration, 
giving no information on who did what.

When I said "who signs" I meant "who is listed as an author of a paper", 
rather than who is in charge of the approval procedure. Could you give me 
a little bit more information on how the 100 names listed in print for the  
human genome paper were selected? How many future publications would you 
expect from The Human Genome Sequencing Consortium? Would a different 100 
people be expected to sign future papers, with reference to the full 
consortium?

Regards

Pippa.



On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Gos Micklem wrote:

> Hi Pippa,
> 
> Practice is varied and there have been a number of mishaps.  For
> really big publications (the human genome - >2500 authors) the full
> publication list was in an online supplement to the paper and a few
> 100 chosen few were listed in the print publication.  The way this
> publication was cited in PubMed (the definitive list of biomedical
> publications www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) was "Lander et al", as Eric
> Lander happened to be the first author, within the first group listed
> as collaborating.  Apparently this annoyed a lot of people as the
> citation was supposed to be "The Human Genome Sequencing Consortium"
> but somehow Nature failed to pass this on to PubMed who won't change
> it unless the journal re-submits which they haven't.  Another
> annoyance for the 2000 extra authors on the full author list is that
> Nature didn't pass that on to PubMed either.  This means that if one
> of those authors cites the paper as a publication and a prospective
> employer checks on PubMed it will seem that they are not an author.
> 
> So - it would be good to be clear on all sides that when a consortium
> is planned as being the "author" that this is dealt with consistently.
> 
> > >I'm involved in a committee established by IUPAP to discuss the  
> > >authorship
> > >policy of the large HEP collaborations, and how to improve the  
> > >recognition
> > >of who did what within the collaboration and for a particular paper.  
> 
> Who did what is obviously a tricky one when large numbers are
> involved.  The best thing to do is probably to explain what each team
> did, rather than each individual.  The recently-established, highly
> regarded open access journal PLoS Biology is among the first in the
> biomedical sciences to include a paragraph giving an author by author
> account of their contributions.  Authorship battles (who is first,
> last, corresponding author) are very common in the biosciences and I
> imagine that this new practice will introduce a new level of battling.
> I'm not sure what they will do if a paper is submitted with a very
> large number of authors: probably they will attribute by group.
> 
> > >One
> > >thing the committee wants to do is survey current practice in other
> > >disciplines with large collaborations. I volunteered to try and find  
> > >out
> > >what the current practice is for papers in the field of genetics/human
> > >genome, and was wondering if one of you had a college colleague  
> > >involved
> > >in the Sanger Institute who could give me a short summary of how they  
> > >deal
> > >with publications, especially who signs (main authors, large  
> > >teams.....?)
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "who signs" - do you mean who signs off
> on the draft?  This can be done in a hierarchical way - the team
> leaders being responsible for signing after appropriate consultation
> within their teams.
> 
> If you mean who is cited as an author I think that anyone who has
> contributed substantially should be an author and it is quite wrong
> for only the group leaders to be cited "because there would be too
> many authors otherwise".  The names and affiliations of ~2000 authors
> will only be around 100,000 characters which is tiny amount in these
> days of electronic publication.  There is something to be said for
> very large multi-team publications being cited as a consortium listing
> just the collaborating institutes, with the details of all those
> involved listed elsewhere.  What is bad practice is to have a two-tier
> system with those who happened to be around at the right time gaining
> a "proper" citation and others not.
> 
> Hope this helps - let me know if you have further questions,
> 
> Gos
> 
> 
> 

-- 
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
      Pippa Wells, Div EP, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland.
      Telephone 78179 or 73839 (External +41 22 76 78179 or 73839)
   +---------------------------------------------------------------------+