Our philosophy on coauthorship and sharing data

Coauthorship and sharing data are equity issues.  All too often some scientists are not included as coauthors on papers even though the scientific work would not be possible without the data that they collected and the expertise that went into collecting high quality data.  Meanwhile scientists with higher stature are included on papers having done little or nothing.  In the Nye lab, we include students and technicians when they have played an integral role in collecting high quality data.  Science is not possible without many people with many different talents working together toward a common cause.  Papers with a large author list show the true number of people that are necessary to do complex research.  Papers that don’t include all the people that did the work glorify individualism and give the false impression that a few sharp minds advance the state of science. Rosalyn Franklin would tell us that this was never the case.  The scientific endeavor should be more inclusive, which means broadening the definition of who is considered worthy of coauthorship.  We adopt the coauthorship philosophy of the Laskowski lab and invite those that share our ideals to collaborate with us!  We share our data and code on our Github sites and are happy to share data collected in our lab, but would prefer to be meaningful contributors to those pieces of work and as such, be coauthors.