The executive committee has put together a Publication Policy and a Code of Conduct. We encourage you to read it and send us any comments by replying to this thread in the MUSES Forum by no later than June 26th. The period of time between now and that date will be designated to fold any recommendations you may have into the policies (if possible), and to discuss with you (if needed) any points raised in either policy. Just as a point of clarification, no publication or ethical issues have arisen in the collaboration. These policies are only to establish expectations and prevent any issues that sometimes arise in large collaborations.
Once the request-for-information period has elapsed, the executive committee will vote on the adoption of the revised policy, which will then be made public through our website. Thank you for your help.
Are there any thoughts about how to handle using MUSES products? Any policy on involving non-MUSES people in short author papers (eg non-MUSES collaborator adding an extra case to a module with input from the main module author)? If one leaves MUSES (eg graduates and works for a different group), does one (for how long) retain authorship even if a paper is delayed (eg slow internal review)?
Those are all excellent points. There are thoughts about how to handle MUSES products (e.g. requiring that any papers written that use the products cite the MUSES calculation engine paper and any module release papers applicable), but these thoughts haven’t been codified into a policy yet. This is because we haven’t written any of the release papers yet. This is however on our to do list, and we will create a policy for it when the time comes.
Regarding non-MUSES people, we don’t have any policy about that case per se. If a non-MUSES person wants to collaborate with MUSES people on a short author paper, I think that’s great. Such a paper would fit in the short-author case of the publication policy. And maybe we can convince the non-MUSES people to join MUSES!
Regarding leaving MUSES, that’s a good point that we haven’t contemplated in the policy, and which we will have to think about how to codify. My thoughts are that if the person contributed to module X, then that person should be an author e.g. in the module release paper of module X, even if the person leaves the collaboration in the write up process. I’ll add a paragraph to the publication policy to that effect unless anybody has a problem with that.
