Authorship Criteria

Bentham Open Science requires that all individuals listed as authors must have made a substantial contribution to the design, performance, analysis, or reporting of the work. The role of authors is judged on the basis of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.

Authorship Declaration

All contributing authors are required to sign a copyright letter specifying their full name, affiliation, email address, ORCID ID, and their individual contributions to the article. Upon successful electronic submission of a manuscript, a system-generated acknowledgement will be sent to all authors using the email addresses provided.

Authors and Institutional Affiliations

A finalized list of authors must be submitted at the time of manuscript submission. The order of authors should be confirmed, as no additions, deletions, or rearrangements will be permitted after submission. The email address of the principal author should be provided with an asterisk (*). Additionally, the full postal address, business telephone numbers, fax numbers and e-mail address of the corresponding author(s) must be provided to facilitate communication and receipt of galley proofs. Bentham Open Science recommends that all contributors maintain updated profiles on SCOPUS, ORCID and other databases.

Author Identification

Authors are strongly encouraged to use their ORCID ID when submitting a manuscript for consideration. ORCID IDs can also be obtained during the submission process. For more information about ORCID IDs, visit here.

Authorship and AI Tools

Bentham Open Science recognizes that authors may use a variety of tools during manuscript preparation.

According to the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines, "AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements".

The pertinence of such tools may vary and evolve with public opinion, due to which the use of AI-powered language tools has led to a significant debate. These tools may generate useful results, but they can also lead to errors or misleading results; therefore, it is important to know which tools were used for evaluating and interpreting a particular scientific work.

Considering the above, we require that:

1. Authors must disclose any significant use of AI tools, including software or text-generating technologies, in the methods section or as appropriate based on subject-specific standards.
2. All co-authors should sign a declaration that they take full responsibility for all of the Manuscript’s contents, regardless of how the contents were generated. Inappropriate language, plagiarized and biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content generated by AI language tools and the relevant results reported in scientific works are the full and shared responsibilities of all the authors, including co-authors.
3. AI language tools must not be listed as authors. Instead, their use should be transparently reported as per clause (1).

Changes to Authorship

At the time of initial submission, the finalized list of authors in the correct sequence should be provided, which will not be changed once the publication process starts.

In exceptional cases, requests for the addition/deletion of an author may be considered by the publisher subject to a) written approval from all co-authors, and b) a strong justification (which may or may not be accepted by the Publisher).

Here is some advice from COPE on authorship issues. Bentham Open strives to follow these guidelines.

General Advice

Advice on how to spot authorship problems

Non-Author Contributors

Activities such as the securing funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, or proofreading alone do not qualify any contributor for authorship. Such contributors may be acknowledged - individually or collectively as a group - in the acknowledgements section. Detailed guidance on writing acknowledgements is available on our website. Persons not meeting authorship criteria can be acknowledged in the acknowledgement section of the article rather than being listed as authors.

Guest or Honorary Authorship

All contributing authors should contribute substantially to the article and sign the copyright letter. Bentham Open Science discourages authorship based solely on position (e.g., a research supervisor or a departmental head). We use COPE guidelines for identifying any suspected ghost, guest, or gift authorship.