A workshop sponsored by Harvard and the Wellcome Trust in the fall of 2011 discussed ways to improve recognition and details on all Contributor Roles in a published work. The task force empowered by the workshop findings subsequently built a small taxonomy for use in the categorization of the actual contribution and "author" or other contributor makes to the published paper. The benefits to the library and research communities by having a more precise and extensive identification of all contributions to a paper from modeling to writing are significant.
The initial taxonomy validation has been done by about 25 participating publishers. Each participating publisher identified 50 or more articles with corresponding authors (of multi-authored works with between 2 and 15 authors) and completed a survey; they will provide us with a spreadsheet of relevant author names and journal info. Corresponding authors and participating authors submitted their information using a spreadsheet template. We are now soliciting additional feedback from a variety of constituents, including checking in with other authors of the relevant works to see if the test contributor role assignments accord with their perceptions of their own contributions. we would like to have input from the library community. Further background reading on this project, please see:
http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/attribution_workshop/files/iwcsa_report_final_18sept12.pdf
