Authorship and Intellectual Property Policy

This is the policy most likely to matter to you in practice. Read it before you start a project, not after the paper is written.

1. Authorship criteria

Authorship on a ResearchDen project requires all four of the following:

1. Substantial contribution to the conception, design, data collection, analysis, or interpretation of the work
2. Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for intellectual content
3. Approval of the final version before submission
4. Agreement to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work

These criteria follow the standard used by most journals and conferences.

What does not qualify for authorship:

• Membership in ResearchDen
• Attending meetings or reading drafts without contributing
• Providing compute resources or general encouragement
• Mentoring someone on the project without contributing to the work
• Suggesting the topic without further involvement
• Being the Founder or holding any role in the community

People who contribute meaningfully but do not meet all four criteria should be named in the Acknowledgments, not the author list.

Gift authorship is prohibited. Adding someone as an author who did not do the work is research misconduct. So is omitting someone who did.

2. Author order

Author order must be discussed and agreed at the start of the project, and revisited when contributions change substantially. Do not leave it until submission.

Default convention for ResearchDen projects:

• First author. The person who did the majority of the work, typically leading experiments and drafting the manuscript
• Middle authors. Ordered by contribution
• Last author. The senior researcher providing supervision, direction, and manuscript-level guidance
• Corresponding author. The person who handles submission, reviewer correspondence, and post-publication queries. Usually the first or last author

Co-first authorship with an equal-contribution note is acceptable when two people genuinely contributed equally.

If contributions shift during the project, raise it early. Changing author order late is possible but unpleasant. Changing it after submission is very difficult.

3. Project records

Every ResearchDen project maintains a shared contribution record from day one, listing each participant and what they are responsible for. Update it as the project progresses.

This takes a few minutes per month and resolves most authorship disagreements before they become disputes.

4. Confidentiality of unpublished work

Research ideas, datasets, code, results, and draft manuscripts shared within a ResearchDen project are confidential until publication or public release.

Participants must not:

• Share unpublished work outside the project team
• Present the work as their own individual output
• Submit the work, or a close variant of it, to any venue without the project team's agreement
• Reuse another participant's unpublished data or code in a separate project without permission

This obligation continues after a participant leaves the community, for as long as the work remains unpublished.

5. Data and code

Data collected or created by a project is shared among the project team for the purposes of that project. It may not be sold, licensed, or used commercially.

Code written for a project belongs to its authors. ResearchDen encourages open-source release under a permissive license (MIT or Apache 2.0) upon publication, unless the team agrees otherwise.

Third-party data and code must be used in accordance with its license and terms. Check dataset licenses before use. Many popular datasets restrict commercial or redistributive use.

Institutional data must not be brought into a ResearchDen project without permission from the institution that holds it. This includes clinical data, student data, proprietary corporate data, and anything covered by an IRB protocol or data use agreement. If your data came with conditions, those conditions still apply here.

6. Human subjects and sensitive data

Projects involving human subjects, medical data, or personally identifiable information require appropriate ethics approval from the institution of a participating researcher. ResearchDen has no ethics board of its own and cannot provide approval.

Do not begin data collection involving human participants until this is settled.

7. Affiliation

Participants may list ResearchDen as an affiliation on papers arising from ResearchDen projects, in the form:

ResearchDen, AI/ML Research Community

Participants should also list their primary institutional affiliation. Do not list ResearchDen as an affiliation on work unrelated to ResearchDen projects.

8. Use of AI tools

Generative AI tools may be used for editing, code assistance, and literature exploration. They must not be used to fabricate data, generate results, or write substantive scientific content presented as the authors' own.

AI tools cannot be authors. Disclose AI assistance where the target venue requires it. Check the venue's policy before submission, since these vary.

9. Venue selection

ResearchDen projects target legitimate peer-reviewed venues. Participants should avoid predatory journals and conferences.

Warning signs: guaranteed acceptance, publication within days, solicitation by mass email, fees presented before peer review, and journals whose scope covers everything. When unsure, check the venue against DOAJ, Scopus, or the relevant field's recognized ranking, and ask a more experienced researcher in the community.

A weak publication is worse than no publication for graduate admissions and academic careers. Reviewers read author lists and venue names carefully.

10. Research integrity

The following are prohibited and result in immediate removal from the community:

• Fabricating or falsifying data or results
• Plagiarism, including self-plagiarism and undisclosed text reuse
• Submitting the same manuscript to multiple venues simultaneously
• Manipulating images or figures to misrepresent results
• Buying, selling, or trading authorship
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest

11. Disputes

If an authorship or intellectual property disagreement arises:

1. Discuss directly within the project team first. Most disputes resolve here
2. Raise it with the project's Lead Researcher, who is responsible for the project's coordination
3. Escalate to a Research Operations Lead, who can review it independently of the project team
4. Escalate to the Founder if it remains unresolved. The Founder's decision within the community is final

ResearchDen has no legal authority and cannot bind any institution or publisher. If a dispute involves formal research misconduct, it should be raised with the relevant institution and, where applicable, the journal or conference.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy: contact@researchden.org