Authorship and contribution recognition in infrastructure-scale Earth science collaborations

Deborah Tangunan , Anna Joy Drury

Community-driven collaborative initiatives across palaeoclimate, oceanography, and Earth system science have transformed how scientific knowledge is generated, integrated, and interpreted. Proxy synthesis efforts, climate model intercomparison projects, and scientific drilling programmes increasingly function as collaborative scientific infrastructures sustained by distributed intellectual labour spanning data stewardship, harmonisation, workflow development, methodological arbitration, coordination, governance, and scientific leadership. However, prevailing systems of authorship and academic recognition remain largely designed around paper-centric models of contribution developed for smaller and more time-bounded research projects. As a result, many forms of foundational and integrative labour essential to infrastructure-scale science remain inconsistently recognised within conventional attribution systems. Drawing on our own experiences from collaborative Earth science initiatives and community survey responses, we show that this mismatch has implications not only for fairness and career progression, but also for scientific accountability, sustainability, and the long-term resilience of collaborative Earth system research. We outline emerging community adaptations and propose practical pathways toward more infrastructure-aware approaches to scientific recognition, aimed at aligning attribution systems with the realities of collaborative, infrastructure-scale science.