Abstract

The ‘publish or perish’ culture has induced an unhealthy aspect of academic publishing in the biomedical sciences, namely of illegitimate authorship. Such a position can be obtained when an authorship slot is offered as a gift (e.g., to a sponsor, or researcher in a senior position), without their intellectual or scientific participation, or it can be hidden (ghost authorship), in which the paper (or parts thereof) is written by a third party (individual, or company). In a more industrialized setting, ghost authorship takes place via the sale of papers using “paper mills”, including of specific author slots (i.e., positions in a line of authors). While author-based persistent identifiers like ORCID, or authorship attribution schemes like CRediT, sound noble and offer some form of validation, those systems still operate on a culture of blind trust (in submitting authors). This paper debates a few of the authorship-related issues currently plaguing biomedical journals.