@Drugmonkey has
a very good response to the storm over whether arxiv's proposal to ban all authors on a paper from future submissions if AI hallucinations are found in a paper.
https://drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/05/20/thoughts-on-each-author-taking-full-responsibility/
Relatedly, in the middle of the XX century the scientists that were responsible signed the paper as authors, and everyone else was listed in the Acknowledgements section.
That today we list everybody as "middle authors" is, on the one hand, a consequence of the "publish or perish" culture, and on the other, a way to bring visibility to people who did the actual work (I am thinking here of famous neuroscience papers were the actual work was done by non-PhD women technicians who were merely "acknowledged" instead of signing as first authors, which would have been the case today).
Further, in my own papers, I don't add anyone as author who hasn't read the whole paper and commented on it. As a bare minimum. Each contributor should know first hand what they are agreeing to endorse with their name, even if they couldn't do that work themselves without a lot of training.
But as the blog says, no one really is in the position of being able to vouch for every aspect of a paper. No one can watch every experiment to vouch for its accuracy.
And I’ll confess, with co authored papers I trust my colleagues to cite the relevant research in their sections. Just like I trust them to be doing the experiments as described.
I agree. Yet I ask co-authors to be comfortable with that, because if there is any problem with the paper, they are also going to be impacted.
@albertcardona @MCDuncanLab @Drugmonkey on this note, after reading a few other people's reflections on the policy, I think my greatest concern is that coauthors, particularly middle authors, may not even be aware they're on a paper until after it's submitted, perhaps even after damning issues have been found by reviewers or editors and brought consequences down on them. I have more than once been told about a paper's existence after it was submitted and been invited to give any feedback in the meantime to be addressed during revisions.
If they have concerns, especially on papers with many coauthors, they may not be in any position to do anything about it short of take their name off. I have witnessed it happen and have great respect for that decision, but it's not an easy one. Coauthors likely don't have an opportunity to verify something they're only vaguely uncertain about. I think some journals' policies of collecting contribution statements from authors (X and Y carried out experiments, Y and Z did data analysis, Z wrote the manuscript) is a sensible partial remedy for this.
At the same time, I want to acknowledge that the absolutist stance has some merit -- if personal responsibility for the entire contents of a paper became, practically and enforceably, the norm, I imagine we'd shift other norms and practices to accommodate. I just don't think that's the case at the moment, and it seems unnecessarily destructive to the coauthors who contributed in good faith to jump to the level of enforcement that this policy does.
@iris @albertcardona @Drugmonkey
I too have been added to papers without my knowledge. Indeed, for one, I ended up being somewhat unhappy with the direction the paper took (this was a project I left unfinished when I left the lab) but the choice was either to stay as an author as is, or withdraw my name, and not get credit for work I'd done.
In this case, it was not anything falsified, just I felt they overinterpreted the data.
@Canageek @iris @albertcardona @Drugmonkey
😱 and for physics arxiv is like *the* publication of record.
My god, that's going to kill careers.
MCDuncanLab
Albert Cardona
Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)
Canageek