Biology Open uses the CRediT taxonomy listed below to define author contributions to primary research papers and requires that the independent contributions of each author be provided during online submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure that contributions are agreed on by ALL co-authors prior to manuscript submission.
The CRediT taxonomy does not determine who qualifies as an author. Each author on a paper may have one or more CRediT contribution roles, but having a role described by the taxonomy does not automatically qualify someone as an author. Authorship is determined by following our journal policy on author contributions.
If there are contributors whose input does not rise to the level of authorship, ensure that proper acknowledgements are included in the manuscript.
| Contributor role | Role definition |
| Conceptualization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models |
| Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| Formal analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data. |
| Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| Data Curation | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse. |
| Writing – original draft preparation | Creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). |
| Writing – review and editing | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages. |
| Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
| Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| Project administration | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| Funding acquisition | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |