There is no clear rule for authorship. It always depends on the first author...how much he appreciates your work. Just let him know that you would appreciate a co-authorship. My personal experiences are ambivalent. Sometimes I felt left out, in other cases I didn't want to be a co-author since my contribution was only minor (but I became a co-author). Just let him know...

I would say if core facilities do routine work (like peptide fingerprinting for proteins or mass determination, checking for isotope labeling) it's enough to acknowledge the facility or the contributing person in the acknowledgement section. But in the case where other, more complex work or work that produces a lot of relevant data for the publication and also that requires comprehensive analysis is generated, the mass spectroscopist should be presented as a co-author. I guess that it should just be discussed with the other authors, like Steffen suggested.

For the core facility at our university, the mass spectrometry work is often very routine and since the facility does get paid for its work, the personnel is not often included as co-authors. I actually do all the necessary mass spectrometry myself to avoid situations like this and also to handle what data is really relevant to be included in a publication.

There are no hard and fast rules for this. In the European Union the ESF provides some guidance on the general framework for cores (attached), but that is about as specific as I could find. My experience is to get agreement on this upfront, before actually starting analysis.

In our core we do have a pricelist with standard items which are all following SOPs. Here we are not asking for authorship - acknowledgement should be done though - but reimbursement of cost. These are all items a technician can and does perform at high quality, maybe with the exception of a quick sanity check and results discussion.

Anything beyond the pricelist will require development or customization of methods, and here co-authorship has to be agreed upon before starting analysis as it constitutes scientific input. We have these things in writing in the form of a Terms & Conditions document, and for every project we require signature at least on the PI level that a) the user accepts the proposed pricing scheme and b) they acknowledge and agree to the T&C.

I was first a bit worried that these upfront agreements would put off potential users, but actually they like it and the feedback (and payment morale) is very positive - people like to know what they are getting into up front. If you have to have these discussions post fact, on the other hand, then there is a high chance of conflict.

On a side note - think carefully about what goes into your pricelist :-)

I was responsible for obtaining critical mass spectrometry on a novel peptide discovery. The work was done beautifully, gratis by the cooperator, and several other MS cooperators were co-authors who used their then-unique techniques. For this, I will be forever grateful. These MS cooperators were not included in several U.S. Patents, at a time that natural products were not regarded as patentable, and I have heard that they were not pleased. By the way, not a single penny has reverted to the discoverers/original patentees or their institutions, and probably never will, because of the University's Patent system. By the way, delusions of grandeur regarding patents are common in the USA, but that is a topic for another question to RG.

Hopefully full disclosure and agreements as described above would help, assuming that such legal representation ever helps anything. It can't help cooperative efforts. My thought is that it would utterly kill them, because I very rarely had money for outside assistance. The scientists mentioned above are prominent and successful members of ResearchGate and might comment!

I think the contributions above are all right and valuable. But maybe this thought is making life a bit more clear: Generally speaking everybody that had a significant scientific impact on a paper should be co-author. Scientific impact is of course a bit a matter of personal assessment. Considering MS-units, most people would think, that a service measurement like run the sample, record, do semi-automatic calculations and print (as typically provided by technicians) will not qualify for co-authorships. If, however, the MS unit helped to provide new insight or knowledge (e.g. suggesting decisive experiments that led to structural elucidation) on the main issue of the paper, the people from the MS-unit could expect to be co-authors. I like Christofs approach in getting clarification upfront.

Being upfront and honest when new users come into the Facility is the key. I always tell people that when I have to interpret data or train someone to interpret data (which involves analysing their data while you show them how its done), then I'd appreciate being on the paper. Maintaining the instruments so samples can be run doesn't count. Handing over raw data or even search engine output doesn't count in my opinion. I have to make a scientific contribution, not just act as technician.

Thank you all for your detailed responses. I would like to add a few specifics about my situation so I can get more opinions.

We submitted a manuscript that includes about 5-6 days of instrument acquisition time. One reviewer asked for additional analysis of an in-gel digest, which we did with a separate mass spec and totals 4.5 hours of instrument time (less than 5% of the total acquisition time). I analyzed the data and added a couple sentences about the result and 1/3 of a figure. My advisor is insisting that the technical contribution of the in-gel digest deserves authorship in the resubmisson . I feel that this simple, routine analysis (a paid service of the facility) deserves only acknowledgement. I further found that the technician did not want to be author.

What do you think?

Tricky. I have to recover the cost of reagents and thus am not contributing those and thus the reagents don't get me authorship. Digests are not that difficult, but I've normally taken the person through it previously. I'd say that wasn't worth authorship. The technician definitely deserves acknowledgement, you deserve authorship for your analysis, sentences and figure.

When the submitter is paying for all the costs, including salary costs, and no further scientific contribution is made, I don't believe authorship is warranted.

Dear Jesse,

If I am the managing author of a paper I would not let anyone participate in writing the manuscript and submit figures if I am not intending to offer co-authorship, except we are talking language editing. - but that might be very much my personal view.

Runtime on a machine does in my eyes not offer help with the co-author ship issue.

Interesting question. As a rule, if we are getting paid for our services, we don't get co-authorship. For our own projects or if we are collaborating, we claim authorship. In either case, things are clear before we start sample analysis.

I agree with the highly professional replies above:

No scientific input = No authorship [ routine MS measurements are not scientific input]

I worked very closely with our Core facility a little while back for both sequencing and MS applications. We had many discussions with the director of the facility, and he helped us with interpreting data and designing experimental modifications. We performed dozens of sequencing runs, for which the Core bioinformatician played a role in initially interpreting raw data for coherence and quality. There were two other technicians in the Core that worked with preparing sequencing emulsions and performing gel digests. In the end, the director of the lab got authorship, the bioinformatician was acknowledged by name, and the technicians acknowledged collectively.

As others have said - scientific contribution = authorship. Everything else is "The authors thank X for their outstanding technical assistance." Of course, this is all at the discretion of the senior author. I would say that since the technician in your case doesn't care about authorship, I don't think you'd be slighting them to leave them off, but it would certainly be a nice/ethical gesture to acknowledge their technical contribution.

I generally use 2 criteria:

1) Without the contribution from the spectrometrist in question the experiment could not have been carried out an published. If it is purely a fee for service contribution that some other lab could provide then it rates as a technical assistance acknowledgement.

2) Each co-author should be able to defend the entire experiment/publication if questioned. Therefore they need to be completely familiar with all aspects of the experimental design and the conclusions reached in the publication.

Thanks for bringing up this question, Jesse. In the last two years, I have been working on the foundation of a new methodology called Crowd-Authoring, which enables an international crowd of academics to co-author a manuscript in an organised way. I have just published an article about this methodology in the Journal of Information Development (Impact Factor 0.491). This is the first published methodology on mass authorship. Here is a link to the article: http://idv.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/07/0266666915622044.abstract

There is also a website for this methodology: https://crowdauthoring.wordpress.com/