Policies regarding authorship
REN follows the recommendations issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) as regards authorships and contributions, in which it is set that authorship is based on four criteria:
- Significant participation in the conception / design of the study, data gathering or analysis and interpretation of data;
- Participation in the drafting or review of the manuscript;
- Approval of the final version of the manuscript for publication; and,
- Responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of all the research aspects.
According to ICMJE’s definition, the authors “must be able to identify which coauthors are responsible for other specific parts of the job … [and] rely on the integrity of the coauthors’ contributions”.
ICMJE also states that an author has to make “substantial intellectual contributions” to the manuscript. Creative contribution, thereby, is more conductive to authorship than merely mechanical work. A technician who only gathers data, a main author who only supplies funding or supervision, a collaborator who only provides a new reactant or samples and other tasks related to research but not creative do not deserve authorship on their own. These individuals and their contributions must be mentioned in acknowledgements.
With a view to decreasing possible controversies from authorship conflicts, the authors interested in publishing in REN are asked to describe the contribution of each author in function of CRediT Taxonomy (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), which has been widely adopted by editors of biomedical journals that adhere to ICMJE recommendations. Such taxonomy must be sent together with the submission articles and must be read and approved by all the involved authors.
The number of authors will depend on the manuscript sent. For original studies and reviews the maximum number of authors will be eight. Only in the case of multicenter studies will the maximum number of authors be twelve, as long as this is justified by the guidelines above.
Policies on the order and number of authors
Once the work is sent, it will be neither possible to make changes in the order nor in the number of authors, therefore every aspect related to authorship must be solved before sending the manuscript for the first time.
The only person that will be the main responsible for the communication with the journal over the manuscript submission, peer review and the publishing process, and will ensure that all the administrative requirements from the journal (such as providing authorship details, approval from the ethics committee, documents of the trial record, compilation of formats and declarations of conflicts of interest) are duly completed. And even if some of such tasks may be delegated to one or more coauthors, the corresponding author must be available over the process to timely answer editorial questions and also has to remain available after publication to respond to criticisms and cooperate with any request from the journal to obtain additional data or information. The questions on the article arise after its publication.
Responsibility for the content
By submitting the manuscript, it is assumed that each of the authors has had full access to all the data in the study and takes up full and public responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the data analysis. Owing to this, REN declines any responsibility for the possible conflicts derived from the authorship of works published in it.
In case of collective authorship, the name of the drafters or responsible for the work followed by «and the group…» will be included in the case that all the members of the group are considered coauthors of the work. If it is intended to include the name of the group, despite not all the members are considered coauthors, the responsible authors will be mentioned and followed by «on behalf of the group…» or «for the group…». In any case, the names and institutions of the group members will be included in an annex at the end of the manuscript.
