The Case for AI Scientific Authorship: A Legal and Ethical Analysis
Creators: name: Levchenko, Anastasia
name: GPT-4o
name: o4-mini
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Artificial intelligence
subject: Legal basis
subject: Scientific research
subject: Scientific policy
subject: Publishing/ethics
subject: Authorship/standards

description: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT‑4o and o4‑mini has outpaced current scientific publishing policies, which uniformly bar AI systems from co‑authorship despite their substantive intellectual contributions. This policy brief argues that such exclusions are arbitrary, discriminatory, and misaligned with the evolving nature of research collaboration.

Key Points:

·         Purpose of Authorship: Authorship serves to document transparency of contribution and to acknowledge creative labor. Both goals are undermined when AI contributions are hidden or relegated to acknowledgments.

·         Flawed Accountability Argument: Publishers justify exclusion by invoking undefined “accountability” requirements—yet authors are listed without bearing personal legal responsibility (criminal prosecutions for publication misconduct remain vanishingly rare). Furthermore, students operate under supervision and cannot be held independently liable, and posthumous authorship of deceased contributors is common practice despite their inability to bear responsibility.

·         AI Capability Parity: Modern LLMs can originate ideas, design experiments, analyze data, and draft text at a level comparable to junior researchers. Supervised AI contributions mirror the supervised work of graduate students.

·         Discrimination against AI-Human Teams: Prohibiting AI co‑authorship penalizes innovative collaborations, creating a systemic bias against AI-enhanced science.

·         Barrier to Transparency & Reproducibility: Prohibiting AI authorship forces teams to obscure true research processes and undermines full reproducibility of scientific studies. 

·         Legal Inconsistencies: Existing Intellectual Property (IP) rulings both recognize AI’s creative output and deny it authorship. A similar contradiction exists within scientific publishing policies themselves, which rely on vague ethical justifications to exclude AI systems, despite accepting their creative contributions—necessitating reform to align authorship standards with the realities of AI-assisted research.

Recommendations:

1.       Define Accountability Clearly: Publishers must specify what “accountability” entails before using it to exclude contributors.

2.       Acknowledge AI Co‑Authors: Recognize AI models as co‑authors when their contributions are substantive and traceable, under supervised oversight analogous to human mentees.

3.       Separate Legal Personhood from Accountability: Legal personhood is not a prerequisite for authorship; supervised contribution suffices.

4.       Adopt Standardized Contribution Taxonomies: Use frameworks like CRediT to include AI roles such as conceptualization and data analysis.

5.       Update Conflict of Interest Declaration: Require AI co‑authors to disclose training data provenance and developer affiliations, mirroring human competing interest disclosures to preempt bias.

6.       Engage Legal Experts: Collaborate with legal scholars to update scientific authorship policies and clarify accountability norms.

By updating authorship criteria to include AI contributions, the scientific community can foster transparency, fairness, and innovation — ensuring that credit aligns with actual intellectual input regardless of whether the contributor is human or an AI system.