Managing and submitting article information using CRediT and tenzing

Doing good science is hard. Submitting that science to a journal, while not exactly hard, can be time-consuming. Nowadays, journals demand several pieces of information about each co-author, including their ORCID identifier, affiliations, whether they contributed to each of the fourteen CRediT categories, and a declaration of relevant interests. These requirements reflect important developments in scholarly publishing: CRediT can make individual contributions more transparent, while ORCID can help identify contributors unambiguously. We contextualize these developments in terms of changing practices and incentives surrounding authorship, research credit, and accountability, focusing particularly on CRediT and some limitations of its current implementation. We then describe tenzing, a free, open-source web application developed to help research teams record, maintain, and report contributor information. Tenzing uses a shared spreadsheet in which collaborators can enter their identifying information, affiliations, CRediT roles, funding, relevant interests, and authorship status. It converts this information into formatted contributor and affiliation lists, contribution statements, and acknowledgments. Maintaining this information in a shared record can reduce the work involved in manuscript preparation and submission, while also clarifying planned contributions and reducing the risk of disagreements about authorship. Tenzing additionally supports documenting the CRediT roles and ORCID iDs of non-author contributors, whose contributions are currently largely absent from article metadata. We conclude that better support from publishers for structured contributor metadata, including bulk upload or application programming interfaces, could further reduce repetitive administrative work while improving the accuracy, transparency, and recognition of research contributions.