If members of the facility had extensive involvement in a project then the
expecation was that they would be co-authors in resulting publication(s) in
which the data were discussed, otherwise the authors of the publication
would acknowledge the facility and would mention the numbers of the NIH
grants that supported it. Obviously, what constitutes extensive
involvement in a project is somewhat subjective, but typically this would
involve more than the acquisition and rudimentary interpretation of the
data. For example, obtaining a couple of molecular weight measurements for
a protein (in the early days of MALDI, before everyone and his brother was
able to afford an instrument) would not necessarily be considered enough of
a contribution to merit co-authorship in a biology paper in which the mass
measurement was a secondary point. On the other hand, receiving a protein,
cleaning it up by HPLC, measuring its mass, and then digesting it and
matching the data with the expected peptides noting any abnoramilities
would certainly have constituted significant involvement.
Often, the understanding we had with facility users (and we tried to be
very upfront and clear about this from the beginning in order to avoid
later misunderstandings) was that we would use data generated from their
samples, along with data from other inverstigators' samples and data from
commercial compounds, all with proper acknowledgements, of course) in mass
spectrometric publications (e.g. when we were working on determining the
fragmentation patterns of peptides for which we needed to generate a lot of
data) and the facility users would use the data in biological papeprs. In
such instances we might use samples to generate more data than the
investigator might have deemed sufficient for his/her particular requirements.
I hope this helps.
Ioannis Papayannopoulos
CytoMed, inc.
Cambridge, MA
At 05:55 PM 6/30/98 -0700, Deb McMillen wrote:
>Hi, all,
>Our faculty are (finally) having a discussion concerning
>core (service) personnel and authorship on publications. Several support
>personnel will be affected by this discussion: an electron microscopist,
>a histologist, a DNA sequencer, and myself with HPLC, protein sequencing,
>and much miscellani. I know that we have had several discussions about
>this on this network. I'd like to ask what guidelines you use in your
>core facilities for publication vs. acknowledgement. Also, has anyone
>else saved the earlier emails on this topic--and could you forward a copy
>of them to me?
>
>Thanks very much for your input,
>Deb McMillen
>Institute of Molecular Biology
>University of Oregon
>Eugene OR
>
>