Rogue Scholar Authorship Guidelines

Martin Fenner -

Rogue Scholar archives the content of currently more than 150 science blogs with more than 40,000 blog posts. In this blog post, I want to clarify the guidelines that Rogue Scholar tries to follow regarding authorship.

Rogue Scholar blog posts are scholarly content and thus follow the same basic guidelines as other scholarly outputs, such as journal articles, preprints, or book chapters.

Authorship

All authors are expected to have made substantial contributions to the submitted work and to be accountable for the work both before and after publication. Those who contributed to the work but do not meet the criteria for authorship can be mentioned in the Acknowledgments. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship, as explained by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

And COPE recommends that:

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. 

Rogue Scholar blogger Mark Dingemanse recently made a strong case for why synthetic text is incompatible with science blogging.

Contributor Roles

For blog posts with multiple authors, Rogue Scholar plans to add support for the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT). And for blog posts handled by an editor or undergoing peer review, Rogue Scholar also wants to add those roles.

Possible Actions

Rogue Scholar is an archive of science blog posts, the content is originally published elsewhere, and the decision for publication was taken by the blog authors. In rare cases, blog authors might retract a blog post or post a correction, and that information should also be communicated by Rogue Scholar and via the DOI metadata. When blog posts don't follow the above guidelines, e.g. when inappropriately using AI Tools, Rogue Scholar staff, after consultation with the Rogue Scholar Advisory Board, will decide on appropriate actions, including retraction.

References

  1. McNutt, M. K., Bradford, M., Drazen, J. M., Hanson, B., Howard, B., Jamieson, K. H., Kiermer, V., Marcus, E., Pope, B. K., Schekman, R., Swaminathan, S., Stang, P. J., & Verma, I. M. (2018). Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(11), 2557–2560. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715374115
  2. Authorship and AI tools. (2024). Committee on Publication Ethics. https://doi.org/10.24318/cCVRZBms
  3. Holcombe, A. O. (2019). Contributorship, Not Authorship: Use CRediT to Indicate Who Did What. Publications, 7(3), 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030048
  4. Marcum, C. S. (2025, April 8). Peer-Review for a Blog Post? My Experience with MetaROR. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.54900/bymaz-4fw37
  5. Dingemanse, M. (2025, May 2). Why synthetic text is incompatible with science blogging. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/63b1y-1js90