Authorship Criteria

Bentham Open requires that all individuals listed as authors must have made a substantial contribution to the design, performance, analysis, or reporting of the work. The role of authors is judged on the basis of ICMJE and COPE guidelines.

Authorship Declaration

All contributing authors are required to sign a copyright letter, mentioning complete details, including full name, affiliation, email address, ORCID ID, and their role in the article. After the successful electronic submission of a manuscript, a system-generated acknowledgements will be sent to all authors at their provided email addresses.

Authors and Institutional Affiliations

Authors must provide a final list of authors at the time of submission, ensuring the correct sequence of the names of authors, which will not be considered for any addition, deletion or rearrangement after the final submission of the manuscript. The email address of the principal author should be provided with an asterisk. However, the complete address, business telephone numbers, fax numbers and e-mail address of the corresponding author must be stated to receive correspondence and galley proofs. Bentham Open recommends that all contributors regularly update their profiles on SCOPUS/ORCID and other databases.

Author Identification

Authors are strongly recommended to use their ORCID ID, when submitting an article for consideration. Alternatively, they can acquire an ORCID ID via the submission process. For more information about ORCID IDs, visit here.

Authorship and AI Tools

Bentham Open recognizes that authors use a variety of tools for preparing articles related to their scientific works, ranging from simple ones to very sophisticated ones.

According to the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines, "AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements".

The pertinence of such tools may vary and evolve with public opinion, due to which the use of AI-powered language tools has led to a significant debate. These tools may generate useful results, but they can also lead to errors or misleading results; therefore, it is important to know which tools were used for evaluating and interpreting a particular scientific work.

Considering the above, we require that:

1. The authors are to report any significant use of such tools in their works, such as instruments and software, along with text-to-text generative AI consistent with subject standards for methodology.
2. All co-authors should sign a declaration that they take full responsibility for all of its contents, regardless of how the contents were generated. Inappropriate language, plagiarized and biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content generated by AI language tools and the relevant results reported in scientific works are the full and shared responsibilities of all the authors, including co-authors.
3. AI language tools should not be listed as an author; instead, authors should follow clause (1) above.

Changes to Authorship

At the time of initial submission, the finalized list of authors in the correct sequence should be provided, which will not be changed once the publication process starts.

In exceptional cases, requests for the addition/deletion of an author may be considered by the publisher subject to a) written approval from all co-authors and b) a strong justification (which may or may not be accepted by the Publisher).

Here is some advice from COPE on authorship issues. Bentham strives to follow these guidelines.

General Advice

Advice on how to spot authorship problems

Before Publication:

The corresponding author requests for addition of extra author before publication

The Corresponding author requests for removal of the author before publication

After Publication:

Request for addition of extra author after publication

Request for removal of author after publication

Non-Author Contributors

Activities such as the acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading alone do not qualify any contributor for authorship. Such contributors may be acknowledged individually or together as a group in the acknowledgement section. For more information, please refer to the acknowledgement section of the guide to authors. Persons not meeting authorship criteria can be acknowledged in the acknowledgement section of the article rather than being enlisted as authors.

Guest or Honorary Authorship

All contributing authors should contribute substantially to the article and sign the copyright letter. Bentham Open discourages authorship based solely on position (e.g., a research supervisor or a departmental head). We use COPE guidelines for identifying any suspected ghost, guest, or gift authorship.