Visualized personas for CRediT roles

CRediT is the most frequently used contributor role data model, adopted extensively by key scholarly stakeholders including funders (e.g., Wellcome Trust), publishers (e.g., Elsevier, Sage, Springer), and repositories (e.g., Zenodo/InvenioRDM), and is expected to play an increasingly critical role in the context of data sharing and open science workflows. By providing a standard list of fourteen roles to specify individual contributions to scholarly publications, CRediT enhances transparency and consistency about reporting diverse contributions to scholarly works, thereby improving the attribution of credit and responsibilities. However, CRediT can be limited, as it oversimplifies complex research activities and overlooks the rich range of responsibilities and requirements in today’s interdisciplinary research. Likewise, ethical application of CRediT suffers from inconsistent and sometimes inaccurate understanding of roles, resulting in the misattribution of credit and responsibilities due to brief descriptive definitions of roles that are difficult to apply across disciplines. In response, we have developed a strategy to articulate CRediT roles with persona profiles to facilitate better communication of these roles and reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding.  

This project is supported by a Mission Advancement Award from Northwestern University Department of Preventive Medicine and the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS, UL1TR001422).