CRediT roles and accountability
Accreditation, Roles, and Authorship in SSA Projects
SSA projects use a structured division of labour based on the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). This framework ensures that credit, accountability, and scientific integrity are aligned in large, multi-site collaborations.
Project Structure
SSA projects are organised around two complementary components:
Central Team (led by the PIs)
The central team is responsible for:
- Conceptualisation and theory.
- Methodology and design.
- Experiment programming.
- Analysis plans and formal statistical analysis.
- Data curation standards.
- Visualization.
- Manuscript drafting.
- Project administration, supervision, and cross-site coordination.
These functions are centralised to ensure consistency, rigor, and reproducibility across all participating sites.
Country/Online Teams
Country/Online teams are responsible for the local/online implementation of the study, including:
- Data collection and fieldwork.
- Ethical approval and compliance.
- Recruitment and participant management.
- Translation and cultural adaptation.
- Quality control.
- Reproducibility checks.
Country/Online teams typically include roles such as Team Lead, Data Collection Officer, Translator, Quality Checker, Ethics Officer, and Reproducibility Analyst. Team Leads coordinate their teams and serve as the link to the central team. Team Leads are expected to be SSA members.
CRediT Role Map
The taxonomy below shows how SSA maps contributor roles to specific responsibilities. Completed roles determine authorship and acknowledgment.
Roles are mapped to SSA responsibilities.
Contributors fulfill declared roles.
Completed roles determine credit.
Central Team Roles
Principal Investigator (PI)
- Conceptualization.
- Methodology.
- Writing - Original Draft.
- Writing - Review & Editing.
- Supervision.
- Project administration.
- Ethics approval.
Data Analyst
- Formal analysis.
- Data curation.
- Visualization.
Experiment Programmer
- Software development and testing.
Country/Online Team Roles
Country Lead
- Resources.
- Writing - Review & Editing.
- Supervision.
- Project administration.
- Ethics approval.
Reproducibility Checker
- Validation (replication and reproducibility checks).
Data Collection Officer
- Investigation (data collection).
- Data curation.
Accreditation and Authorship
Authorship and acknowledgment in SSA projects are based strictly on completed CRediT roles, not on status, seniority, or funding.
- Contributors earn credit by formally assuming one or more defined roles and fulfilling the associated tasks.
- Contributors may hold multiple roles if they can meet all responsibilities.
- Some roles are incompatible (e.g., a person cannot be both an Analyst and a Reproducibility Analyst for the same work, because that would require auditing their own output).
- Funding acquisition does not by itself qualify for authorship.
Because SSA is crowd-sourced and collaborative, raising or contributing funds is treated separately from scientific contributorship.
Agreements and Integrity
- Roles, responsibilities, and authorship rules are agreed upon before data collection, ideally prior to submission of a registered report.
- Only minor or necessary changes may be made later, and these must be documented.
- All authorship decisions are governed by CRediT role completion, SSA collaboration agreements, and SSA scientific integrity standards.
This system ensures that credit is fair, transparent, and earned, and that SSA publications reflect genuine, accountable scientific contributions.