Introduction

Research publication is both a researcher’s greatest output and an indispensable resource for scientific and technological development. For centuries, research publications have served as the primary mechanism by which knowledge is documented, shared, and archived. Such publications create a legacy and allow one to track developments of knowledge, ideas, and disciplines through time and use various peer-review models to ensure that contributions meet disciplinary standards. The scholarly and scientific publishing world has evolved from handwritten text and illustrations to the transformative printing press era, and finally, the electronic publications of today, that reside in online knowledge systems. Another recent transformation includes the emergence of open-access publishing, greater transparency by publicly sharing the data and materials upon which a publication is based, and enhanced peer-review processes intended to reduce bias and increase rigour.

However, despite these developments, one issue that has existed since the emergence of the scholarly and scientific literature is authorship. Authorship in a scientific publication is an indicator of significant intellectual contribution to scientific work. Regardless of the discipline, authorship is a currency in research, and it is important for research-related personnel to receive credit, take responsibility, and be accountable for their publications. Authorship is used to assess performance and thus influences hiring decisions, promotions, awards, scholarships, salaries, funding, and invitations to serve or participate in prestigious activities that are beneficial to career advancement. Thus, authorship is not just a list of names. It is a mechanism to establish recognition, credit, integrity, accountability, and responsibility in research and development. Therefore, it ought to be free from any form of misinterpretation, errors, wrongful inclusions, and exclusions.

United Nations Regulatory Framework on Authorship Management

The Administrative Instruction ST/AI/167 of 14 April 1966, bearing Attribution of authorship and related matters in United Nations publications and other papers, signal the beginning of regulatory frameworks on authorship management in the United Nations System. More recently, the Under-Secretary-General for Management, pursuant to section 4.2 of the Secretary-General’s bulletin ST/SGB/1997/1, and for the purposes of amending the provisions, procedures and policy on the attribution of authorship in United Nations documents, publications and other official papers, promulgated Administrative Instruction ST /AI/189/Add.6/Rev.5, bearing Regulations for the control and limitation of documentation: Attribution of authorship in United Nations documents, publications and other official papers, which replaced ST/AI/189/Add.6/Rev.4 of 12 February 1996 and ST/AI/189/Add.6/Rev.3 of 19 March 1990 on the same topic.

Based on the above framework, respective UN agencies have put in place an enabling environment for authorship management in their knowledge production and publication activities. This is the case with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), where, Information circular 043 of December 12, 2013 , provided the guidelines on Publications and Documentation. The objective was “to inform staff members of the basic tenets governing publishing at ECA, [and] ensuring that the Commission’s publications programme is cohesive and of the highest quality possible, delivered and marketed in a timely manner in formats that meet the demands of today’s and future ECA audience” (para. 1). Equally, to ground the reprofiling process of the ECA and to be further sharpened upon completion of the branding exercise of ECA as a premier policy think-Tank of the continent. It also takes into account the intention to establish an ECA Internal Publishing House of World-class caliber. And it confirms to the rules laid out in United Nations ST/AIS and amendments and guidelines on publishing in the United Nations as a set by the United Nations Publications Board” (Para. 2).

Despite the above common regulatory framework, over the years disjointed and diverse practices have been observed in authorship management within the Africa UNDS. Furthermore, within agencies, authorship management and related issues have been challenging, and have raised questions, including: Who should be attributed authorship? What benefits does authorship attribution bring to the author? What does authorship signal or mean to the broader community? How should issues and conflicts around authorship be handled?

Recognizing the importance of the unique experience, expertise, and knowledge that the UN system brings to the understanding and management of global issues; mindful of the need to implement ongoing reforms aiming at a more effective, coherent, coordinated, and better-performing United Nations at regional, country and agency levels; and based on the report of the High-level Panel on United Nations System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment addressed to the Secretary-General calling for United Nations agencies to exploit their competitive advantages to “Deliver as One”, the above questions have raised the need to advocate for a rethinking for a more harmonious and common authorship management practice within the Africa-UNDS.

Current Status versus International Recommendations on Authorship Management

To understand the above questions, without being exhaustive, it is important to look at an example of current authorship management practice within the Africa-UNDS and to make a quick summary of international recommendations related to this exercise.

Current Status of Authorship Management within the Africa-UNDS: Evidence from ECA

A review of existing documentation reveals that until now, and despite its substantial output, ECA has not adopted an editorial policy to guide on authorship and publication of its research output. Instead, it has, out of need and custom, relied on assorted administrative documents and institutional practices that have become established over time, and that does not provide clear answers to the above questions on authorship. Historically, the Commission did not include individual authors’ names in publications, a situation that does not give due recognition and credit to researchers. Furthermore, the corporate name of the Commission is not standardized and not included in all her publications, with variant names including ECA, UNECA, Economic Commission for Africa, etc. Apart from the above authorship issues, there is the need to standardize the publishing procedures (peer-reviewed, abstracting, and formatting) for its publications to be correctly indexed in international citation Database systems, widely and openly accessed, informatively exploited, and cited.

International Recommendations on Authorship Management

Amongst international recommendations on authorship management, the recommendation is one of the most respected. It defines an author of a scientific publication as a person who has:
• Contributed substantially to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and
• Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; and made a final approval of the version to be published; and
• Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Most international recommendations recommend the following five strategies for authorship management:
a) Adopt an editorial policy and encourage a culture of ethical authorship: researchers who are being unethical about authorship are simply following local customs and practice. Therefore, institutions need to adopt and rigorously implement an editorial policy that: (i) emphasis on best practices to avoid authorship problems from the outset and (ii) strategies for managing authorship issues once they have occurred.
(a) Initiate discussions about authorship expectations at the very beginning and as the research project evolves: Raise the subject right at the start and not at the end. Continue to discuss ideas about authorship as the project evolves, and especially if new contributors get involved.
(b) Define responsibility and contribution that gives right to authorship. Confirm in writing who will be doing what—and by when, and which contribution is entitled to authorship.
(c) Responsible inclusion in authorship. Publication is the core currency of science, and research teams have a responsibility to be inclusive of those that contribute to realizing a project.
(d) Consider contributions to be intellectual property. An individual scholar or researcher working on an idea, method, database, analysis, or writing is considered by scientific norms and copyright law to be generating a form of intellectual property (IP). Their research is protected by principles of academic freedom and they retain the right to be recognized as the generator of intellectual outputs.

Advocating for a Common Policy to Guide Practice

Best practice requires that all organizations whose activities include the production of scholarly and scientific outputs need to set out, more or less formally, a tacit or explicit editorial policy that will guide in the production of a standardized, consistent, and timely range of publications. Apart from authorship management, the core objectives of an editorial policy are to: (i.) provide a set of guidelines for quality assurance in the production of published material, (ii) design strategies for improve visibility, access and use of the product, and iii) provide tools to measure the impact and performance.

It is true that the administrative instructions of the United Nations Secretariat and other agency-specific documents provide the regulatory framework for authorship management, including guidelines on the publication of research outputs. However, the challenges observed at ECA suggest the need to avoid disjointed, incoherence, and dissonance approach in authorship management within the Africa-UNDS, and to encourage a common practice, greater rigour, guided by a more explicit and comprehensive tool in the form of an editorial policy, which is easy to appropriate and use system-wide.

Indeed, publications and other knowledge products are the main vehicles for transmitting the United Nation’s experience, thinking, and proposals to its Member States, academia, and civil society. As such, they must adhere to high standards in terms of authorship management, content relevance, quality of presentation and style, and timely response to events and the needs of the countries. One of the hallmarks of UN publications must be quality assurance. It is an asset for the organization and as such merits special attention. Quality concerns both processes and products. It involves all participants in the editorial chain, from the germination of ideas to the distribution and dissemination of the final product. The substantive side of quality in publications refers to relevance, timeliness, credibility, and reliability. The formal attributes of quality have to do with authorship management (proper recognition of intellectual contribution), formatting and presentation (length, style, functional design, abstracting, attractiveness), Peer-reviewing (critical in providing scientific value to the contents), referencing (adoption of a unique style for the presentation of bibliographic references). Both elements must be considered in a common editorial policy to guide uniform practice across the Africa-UNDS.

Towards a Common Authorship Management Practice

Recently, the question of authorship has been a source of open debates, which has at times overflowed research corridors and watered down the research efforts undertaken by the Africa UNDS to produce high-impact and world-class publications. This has equally played down and undermined the strategic role of the UN in experience and knowledge sharing in providing understanding and management of global issues. The aim of the ongoing reforms for a more result-driven United Nations and the calling to deliver as one, has exposed the imperative to rethink and repurpose UN publications as the main vehicles of its thoughts across the continent. This has raised the urgent need for a common policy to guide authorship management practice and where the respect for intellectual property rights becomes inalienable to the author.