To be an author

It is a strange confession for an Editor-in-Chief but the more I edit, the more I review, and the more immersed I have become in academic publishing, the less I understand what an author is. I know I am very grateful to authors. I also know we would each like to be one, or at least many of us would, and I know that without authors journals like JHPS would simply not exist. Yet how many authors does it really take to put together a single paper? Authorship issues are perhaps the most common cause of conflict in the scientific publishing world. There are authors who believe their name should have been included on the contributor list when they were not, and there are authors who believe they should not have been included when they were. There are authors, too, who believe they should have been first on the list, or maybe last, and there are plenty who appear not to care, as long as they feature somewhere. Indeed the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), that bastion of editorial and ethical guidance, has recently issued a discussion document that tries to clear the air. Well written though it may be, the conclusion says all – " What is clear is that authorship is a fluid, evolving concept and as it evolves so will the ethical challenges associated with it. " [1] How can academic publishing , JHPS in our case, make sense of any of this? Perhaps it starts with someone called Harold Jefferson Coolidge who, in 1932, has been long credited with coining the phrase " Publish or Perish ". [2] Perish is no joke either. If you are feeling strong, do read the sad story of Professor Stefan Grimm of London's Imperial College who committed suicide in September 2014. [3] It puts the pressure to publish in a completely different light. Actually in Grimm's case it was not so much that he had failed to publish – he had a good track record-but that he had apparently failed to undertake sufficiently expensive research. [4] What on earth will we accuse our colleagues of next? In terms of the number of authors, Greene notes in his article on the demise of the lone author, [5] that from the 1600s until about 1920 the general rule was one author per paper. By 1980 this had all but disappeared. Collaboration and …