Here I describe 8 building blocks which I think are crucial in science, and give suggestions on how to improve credit for them. I gave this talk during the "Credit where credit is due" session at Force 2015 in Oxford, on 13th January 2015. (https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2015)

1. The Building Blocks of
Science
Derek Groen
2020 SCIENCE
Thanks go out to James Suter, Gary Davies,
Moqi Groen-Xu, Miguel Bernabeu and Ulf
Schiller for highly useful discussions.

2. Why do we want credit?
● Why do we want credit, and what is it important for?
○ Funding proposals
■ Can you get the proposed work done,
■ or can you “just” write good proposals?
○ Job applications
■ Do you have the skills to do the job?
○ Recognition

3. Examples of giving credit
● Mentioning contributors.
● Rewarding top contributors.
○ e.g. Nobel Prize, competitive funding
● Scoring and aggregating contributions.
○ e.g., publication count, citations, REF
● Indirect
○ activity leads to something else that is given credit.

4. The Basics
Scientific Resources
● Data
● Software
● Devices
● Samples
Methods
● Algorithms
● Protocols
● Models
● Heuristics
● Statistical
...and of course the research idea (more on that later).

5. Organisation
● Create/manage research groups.
● Handle/divert external
political and administrative duties.
● Attract funding.
Essential for larger scientific undertakings.

6. Scrutiny
● Peer review,
○ incl. post-publication.
● Validation, reproduction.
● Correction.
● Impartiality is key.
Essential for the long term integrity of science.

7. Vision
● Research ideas.
● Identify gaps.
● Long-term research
directions.
● Policy guidance.
● Impartiality is key.
Essential for the long term integrity of science.

8. Academic exposure
● Well-cited publications.
● Invited Presentations.
● Academic awards

9. Public exposure
● Press releases /
● News articles.
● Appearances in the media.
● “Expert” roles.

10. Uptake
● Uptake by society and industry.
● Spin-offs.
● New jobs.
● Economic growth.

11. These are the building blocks we need

12. Questions
● For which building blocks do we not give
credit?
● And for which ones only indirect credit?
● How many of these skills would we
expect/want an individual academic to have?

13. My current impression of credit in my field

14. Extra slides

15. Credit & Scientific Resources
● Software and data papers are gaining acceptance.
○ This is an ongoing effort.
● Repositories (e.g., Github) help quantify software contributions.
● What about other types of scientific resources?
○ e.g., samples or bespoke devices.
● We need to ensure credit is due for creators of all types of scientific
resources. (“Resource paper”..?)

16. Credit & Methods
● Many venues for methods papers, and methods papers
are relatively straightforward to write, once the method
exists.
● Do the existing venues capture the diversity of methods
out there?
● Unsure here, perhaps methods are relatively well-
credited already?

17. Credit & Organization
● Credit for leading projects & students.
● Credit for obtaining funding.
● No differentiation between well and poorly led
endeavours, as final reports are largely kept private.
● We need to curate and aggregate reviews of ongoing
research projects.

18. Credit & Scrutiny
● “Reviewed for Nature” looks nice on a CV.
● Named reviewing emerges (PeerJ).
● Post-publication review emerges.
● Little differentiation between reviewing 1 and 100
papers for Nature.
● Little differentiation between good and bad reviews.
● We need to collect and aggregate reviewing activities,
and identify the best reviewers in our fields.
● Perhaps even a career path for the reviewer?

19. Credit & Vision
● Research ideas are indirectly credited through papers & funding.
● Vision may be indirectly credited by positions in scientific
committees.
● Vision and ideas fundamental to research, but no direct credit
system is known to me.
● Papers/funding can result from ideas from non-authors/Co-Is.
● If we want to encourage vision and creativity, then we need to
directly credit it.
● Patents may be too heavyweight for this purpose.
● Perhaps explicitly credit vision contributions to papers and
contributions to long term research and policy in science?

20. Credit & Exposure/Uptake
● Direct credit for academic exposure.
● Altmetrics etc. contributes to quantifying public
exposure.
● Uptake common indirectly credited (e.g., through
external funding, industrial focus of funding calls).
● Science could benefit from more systematic crediting of
public exposure and uptake
○ e.g., similar to how academic exposure is handled today.

21. What about teaching?
We could probably make a similar, but separate
graph for teaching...