Abstract:

[Purpose/Significance] In the open science environment, the mode of collaborative knowledge production is widely used, and the types of scientific outputs are becoming increasingly diverse. Therefore, effective identification and recognition of various contribution contents made by different contributors in open research is crucial to improve transparent disclosure and effective use of research output's contribution data. [Method/Process] Based on the systematic study of domestic and foreign scholarly contribution theories and practices, this study proposes a scholarly contribution analysis system for open science. From the perspective of the creation process of scientific research outputs, research on the attribution of scientific contributions is carried out, focusing on three aspects: the identification of contributors and contribution elements, the calculation of the degree of contribution, and the representation of contribution data. In addition, a paper from the open access platform PLoS One is selected as an empirical case to demonstrate the validity of the process and method of attributing scholarly contributions. It was found that the contribution score is inversely proportional to the number of contributors, i.e., the more the number of contributors, the less likely it is to have a high contribution score. The more contribution elements contributors participate in, the higher the contribution score they receive. If contributors participate in the same contribution elements, and their contribution scores may also be the same. For the same contribution factor, the higher the number of contributors, the lower the contribution degree of each contributor. This paper summarizes the application scenarios of academic contributions from three aspects: clearly distinguishing author and non-author contributors, establishing correlation between contribution data and other LOD ontologies, establishing attribution and responsibility mechanism for academic contributions, and improving the index system of scientific research evaluation. [Results/Conclusions] Academic contribution is an important part of the open science system. It is an inevitable trend to improve the openness and transparency of academic contributions to various scientific research results. However, existing methods for attributing contributions are scattered, lack systematicity, and mainly apply to a certain type of achievement, which has certain limitations in terms of disciplines and achievements. In the future, the applicability of the contribution attribution method can be improved by expanding the application objects of contributions to include research papers, scientific data, scientific software, preprints, scientific notes, and more, establishing a common contribution element system for all types of research outputs, and optimizing the method of calculating the contribution rate. Finally, it is necessary to continuously enrich and expand the application scope and application scenarios of scientific research output's contribution data.

Key words: open science, scientific research outputs, contribution data, contribution identification, contribution attribution