About
There has been a fundamental shift to recognize both the interdisciplinary, team-based approach to science as well as the hundreds and thousands of more fine-grained contributions of varying types and intensities that are necessary to move science forward. Unfortunately, little infrastructure exists to identify, aggregate, present, and (ultimately) assess the impact of these contributions. These significant problems are technical as well as social and require an approach that assimilates cultural and social aspects of these problems in an open and community-driven manner. Ongoing efforts include the development of a contribution role ontology (which imports and extends the CRedIT ontology) to support modeling of the significant ways in which the translational workforce contributes to research; better understanding of the types of research objects generated; and mining of acknowledgements section of publications to harvest existing contributor roles to serve as a data source to drive additional development. All work is carried out in a collaborative, open, and friendly manner - with an eye toward making credit and attribution easier for everyone.