# Transparent Attribution of Contributions to Research: Aligning Guidelines to Real-Life Practices
## 5 A More Granular Contributorship Taxonomy for Fair, Open Attribution  
For CRediT to become a tool that accurately apportions due credit for all types of contributions to research, it should be further developed and refined with input from non-profit scientific and professional associations, as a safeguard against features designed to favor the commercial interests of software or publishing companies. First and foremost, it should become equally adroit at correctly identifying both byline authors and non-author contributors (acknowledges). This would require modifications to its implementation in Editorial Manager and ReView. In practice, implementation would benefit by preferring, in published reports, presentation by taxa (Figure S1A,D-F) instead of by author (Figure S1B,C,G,H).  
The changes we propose would enable the taxonomy to fulfill its initial aim, namely to \"capture all the work that allows scholarly publications to be produced\" including that done by contributors \"named in acknowledgements\". As we argue above, revision is needed for the sake of openness and transparency, and to allow full disclosure along with public credit and accountability for non-author contributors to research. Greater transparency about research and publication processes would, we believe, help to maintain the public's trust in science.  
We propose revising three existing roles and adding two new ones to more accurately identify both author and non-author contributions (Table 1).  
* For _technical support_, we propose (i) characterizing the \"Investigation\" role as an author activity by adding \"as an author named in the byline\", and (ii) adding a new \"Technical support\" role to report, for example, laboratory, clinical or field work done by persons named in the acknowledgments.
* For _writing the original draft_, we propose changing the \"Writing--Original Draft\" role to \"Drafting the manuscript\" and specifying in the definition that this may be done by either an author named in the byline or a non-author named in the acknowledgments. Importantly, the potentially confusing term \"substantive translation\" should be deleted from the definition.
* For _revising the draft_, we propose replacing \"Writing--Review & Editing\" with \"Critical review and approval of the manuscript, as author\". We also recommend removing the words \"pre- and post-publication stages\" from the definition, for the reasons explained above.
* Finally, we propose adding a new category, \"Translating or editing the manuscript\", as a non-author role, and specifying in the definition that this role is acknowledged.  
Importantly, these changes clearly distinguish between authors' revisions of the manuscript and changes to the manuscript made by a non-author editor or translator. This distinction is important because authors alone have control of the content of the manuscript: it is the authors who approve the final version for submission and the one that is published, whereas non-author contributors do not have this responsibility. Furthermore, non-author contributors should not be held accountable for the content; thus their contributions need to be credited differently from those of authors. The changes we suggest aim to facilitate recognition of and accountability for the work done by non-author contributors in a way that openly and accurately reports the nature and extent of their contribution, whether limited or substantial.