Today (03/01/2022), the Staff Scientists Appointments and Promotions committee sent out the email below addressed to all WIS PIs. The email is a reminder to the PIs to acknowledge on publications any staff scientist who contributed to the research, in particular staff scientists in the core facility units. At the same time, staff scientists are encouraged to be proactive in ensuring that they receive the recognition due to them for their work. As the committee points out, just because the PI paid for the services from their research budgets, this is not a valid excuse for excluding a staff scientists from the list of authors.
Dear WIS PIs,
As members of the Staff Scientists appointments and promotions committee, we would like to kindly call your attention to a recurrent issue that we have observed during the committee work – lack of adequate recognition of the work of staff scientists on manuscripts. In particular, we have noticed cases where staff scientists from the Core Facility Units (CFU) are not properly acknowledged for their contributions in the form of authorship.
The Staff Scientists track is an academic one – meaning that promotions are decided based on academic achievements and merit – manuscripts, talks/posters at conferences, teaching etc… This also means that a similar scientific process to that which applies to group leaders also applies to staff scientists. Acknowledgment of an intellectual contribution on manuscripts (as an author or other acknowledgment in the manuscript as appropriate) is therefore crucial to ensure timely promotion and essential for us to be able to recruit and sustain high quality scientists in this track. In addition, it is also a source of pride and a sense of accomplishment and hence, obviously, should not be denied from staff scientists.
We are all very fortunate to enjoy outstanding service at our CFUs. Academic personnel of these units are the ones who allow these services to exist and further develop in line with the progress of science. While it is true that we pay for the services we get from Staff Scientists in the CFUs, this should be viewed similarly to the fellowships that we pay our own students and trainees. Consequently – if a Staff Scientist from a CFU contributed data that would merit authorship of your own student, please make sure to give authorship to the Staff Scientist as well. If a Staff Scientist provided help that does not warrant authorship, please still make sure to acknowledge their help in the acknowledgment section. Please also make sure to bring to their attention the publication, prior to submission of the manuscript, to give them the opportunity to critically review their part in the research.
Thank you for taking this into consideration.
The members of the Staff Scientists appointments and promotions committee:
Maya Schuldiner
Eran Bouchbinder
Valery Krizhanovsky
Ami Navon
Ofer Feinerman
David (Didi) Margulis
Phillip Selenko
