Guidelines for Intellectual Contributions and Credit (Version March 2025)
In alignment with the general guidelines for intellectual contributions and credit outlined by ESIIL (here) and the agreement of our working group, we outline the following rules and processes for authorship and intellectual contributions:
Intellectual Property (IP)
Materials, including specific project ideas/conceptualization, discussion/breakout/summary notes, video recordings, and sub-working group activities generated during the ESIIL AI4NM workshop and monthly meetings are considered intellectual property. Before formal publication, AI4NM leadership team (Licheng Liu, Sparkle Malone, Gavin McNicol, Youmi Oh) must be granted sufficient time to review the manuscripts and/or products to ensure proper citation and credit for AI4NM working group contributions. Data that the AI4NM working group collected span various data license agreements. Please do not distribute AI4NM data beyond the working group participants without permission from the leadership team.
IP guidelines from ESIIL
“Intellectual Property” (IP includes all copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property rights. Usually of commercial interest.
Where the intellectual property of individuals or organizations needs to be explicitly defined and agreed upon, teams should also reach out to Jennifer Balch for consultation and ask their tech lead to consult with the ESIIL CI team.
Participants warrant they have the authority to share or work with data or other IP within the ESIIL Working Group environment.
Otherwise:
- IP that is developed may be the property of the US Government.
- And/or IP that is developed may be licensed free-of-charge by the US Government.
Invitation of WG members
Due to the large size of our WG and limited funding, we invite new WG members if (1) they can provide data/resources directly for our research, (2) develop and contribute to publications, or (3) they can conduct AI modeling for our WG.
Communication Protocol
The AI4NM leadership team takes responsibility for organizing working group communications, such as group emails and full group meetings. If you have a message you want to share or an agenda item to add for an upcoming meeting, please share it first with the leadership team. Having communications coordinated by the leadership team will help prevent duplicate notifications or requests. However, you are encouraged to reach out directly to individual members of the group regarding personal interests or collaborations.
Authorship Rules
We aim to maintain an ongoing open dialogue regarding authorship to ensure that each co-author's contributions are clear and appropriately credited throughout the manuscript/product development and publication process.
Below are the current guidelines based on our discussion during the workshop:
Co-authorship Responsibilities
- Co-authorship Requirements: All co-authors must contribute meaningfully to at least two CRediT categories based on the project/paper-specific table (here is a template). Contributors to only one CRediT category will be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section.
- Author Order: Author order will be determined based on numeric scores derived from contributions to the CRediT categories, and the order can change throughout the review process if contributions change. Those with the same scores will be listed alphabetically.
- Corresponding Author: The person who will lead the project/paper will be listed as a corresponding author unless a significant change in leadership occurs and is agreed upon by the all authors.
Co-authorship Table
To help organize co-authors and track contributions, we will provide the following co-authorship table. The table will be project/paper-specific and organized by the corresponding author based on the tasks required for the project/paper. This will ensure transparency in the authorship order and explicitly acknowledge contributions across the different tasks.
- Ethics paper: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-KD0qOo19hTA0tkEBzOjEo5taGt2JQzp/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110329268661197943635&rtpof=true&sd=true
- Perspective paper: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uFtH9OmwHcth0_ekgmEpJioxmoQAhxxz/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=101465631608480789363&rtpof=true&sd=true