C. Aycock /Science
By Cathleen O’Grady
Camille Noûs first appeared on the research scene 1 year ago as the signer of an open letter protesting French science policy. Since then, Noûs has been the author of 180 journal articles, in such diverse fields as astrophysics, molecular biology and ecology, and he quotes.
But Noûs is not a real person. According to RogueESR, a French advocacy group for research that the character dreamed of, the name – which was deliberately added to articles, sometimes without the knowledge of journal editors – was intended to personify collective efforts in science. But the campaign is naive and ethically questionable, says Lisa Rasmussen, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. This is in line with the basic principle of responsibility to acknowledge along with the authorship, she says. And some magazine editors do not like to go along with the protest.
RogueESR has been protesting in recent years against a French research reform law that introduced new types of temporary research posts. The group, which has no formal leader, says the changes threaten academic freedom and job security, and that the law’s focus on metric research evaluation, such as the number of publications or citations, overemphasizes individual performance and adversely affects research. culture.
Amid the protests, members of RogueESR had a subversive idea: What if they let a fictional researcher slip into their author lists? “Hundreds of articles will make this name the best author on the planet,” they wrote in a newsletter, “with the result that certain bibliometric statistics are distorted and the absurdity of individual quantitative assessment is shown.” The group christened the allegorical author Camille – a gender-neutral name associated with political protests in France – and chose the name Noûs, a play about the French we, meaning “us”, and the ancient Greek nowWhat, which means reason. Calling the name is a public statement of the values of a researcher, said a RogueESR spokeswoman, who asked to remain anonymous because she was concerned about the possible consequences of her activism.
But the idea runs in a dangerous ethical realm, Rasmussen says: Responsibility and accountability must go hand in hand with the credit that comes with authorship, and in the case of Noûs, no one can take those burdens on them. RogueESR says Noûs would withdraw from any article with a breach of integrity (via the secretaries who manage the email account). But as Noûs grows, RogueESR could lose control of the brand, Rasmussen says. “At some point, if it does not go beyond them, who is shouting Camille Noûs’ name?”
Jean-Philippe Lansberg, a physicist at CNRS, the French national research agency, says the name is an ‘elegant and harmless way of protesting.’ Lansberg, which Noûs on a paper in Physics Letters B– the most quoted work of Noûs ‘work to date – thinks Noûs serves as a kind of sting operation to expose the weaknesses in writers’ conventions. In high-energy physics, long author lists make it impossible for anyone to take meaningful responsibility for research. Noûs shows these authorship standards, and the criteria on which they are based are impoverished and absurd, he says.
Some writers, such as Lansberg, have not told editors that Noûs is not a real person. A spokesman for Scientific reports tell Science that ‘concern about’ authorship was raised on an article in the magazine in which Noûs appeared and examined the magazine. And a paper in Physical overview B published a correction stating that the inclusion of Noûs’ name was in violation of the journal policy and that it had been removed.
This potential for corrections raises another problem, says Rasmussen: Early-career students or researchers who go along with senior authors’ enthusiasm for Noûs can get a correction or even a withdrawal. “It’s going to be with them for the rest of their careers,” she says.
RogueESR initially did not provide guidance on transparency among editors, but now encourages authors to tell editors what Noûs stands for. Many editors of French magazines are okay with the idea, says RogueESR’s spokesman, but international magazines are a more difficult prize.
In one case, a group of mathematicians who committed themselves to the idea of Noûs preferred to present a paper of the consideration at the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A after the editors decided Noûs could not be included. In another case, an editor at Sonfisika refuses to allow the submission of Nous papers, with reference to the authorship standards recommended by the Publications Ethics Committee, which require each author to make substantial contributions to the work and take responsibility for its content.
The collective goals of open and collaborative science are admirable, Rasmussen says, and there are good reasons to challenge authorship standards. But, she says, “It’s not clear to me that you need this writer to achieve any of these things.”