Facilitating multilingual research publishing: Translations of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

Contributorship refers to indicating who did what in a project, going beyond a simple list ofauthors. In scholarly journal articles about a project, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)has become a popular way to provide individual contribution information, often withaccompanying machine-readable metadata. While CRediT is used by hundreds of scientificjournals, the official version of CRediT exists only in English. To support scientific publishersand researchers writing in other languages, we have created translations of the fourteen CRediTroles and their descriptions into thirty-six languages. To ensure high quality, at least one speakerfluent in the target language drafted the translation, with additional involvement of a secondfluent person. Because hundreds of scientific journals publish non-English work, the use of ourtranslations could improve the recognition of the associated researchers’ contributions. We havecontacted relevant publishers and academic organizations to make them more aware of CRediT,of our translations, and of contributorship generally. To conclude, we discuss the potential forCRediT and other ontologies to be applied more broadly, for example to facilitate greater recognition of people who are not co-authors but are named in Acknowledgments sections.