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Your proposal isn't groundbreaking. I've been told in every responsible conduct of research course that if my name is on a paper, I'm responsible for its contents. Totally need to address the issues leading to this such as publish/perish or ghostwriting which is especially prevalent in industry funded studies.

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Dec 12, 2022·edited Dec 12, 2022

It shouldn't be that difficult for an author to review & analyze the sources & methods that were used in collecting data. Failure to do that seems purposeful. That way someone can shape the narrative & direction of science without being held responsible if his or her conclusions prove wrong.

Climate scientist John Christy confirmed what Obama's climate advisor (Steven Koonin) was telling us. The climate Change models don't reflect reality.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compared 102 climate models against observations of actual climate changes from satellites and balloons (the troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, up to a height of around 33,000 feet). What Christy found was that the climate models grossly overstated reality. Earth's temperature has only risen 1 degree in the last 100 years,

Today's weather aberrations (floods, storms, & heat) are totally consistent with has happened in the past 100 years.

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Hi Stuart,

The principle you describe (all authors are equally responsible for a paper’s content and integrity) is enshrined already in the criteria for hundreds if not thousands of journals. For example, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommended authorship guidelines include that each co-author must agree “to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.”

Of course, when questions are actually raised, nothing prevents the co-authors from all pointing at each other, or pointing at the person who collected the data. And as far as I understand university investigations, they naturally conclude that only the person who created the fraudulent part and knew of it is deserving of punishment.

So I guess the question is, how would you enforce the equal-responsibility clause; that is, how do you propose to give it teeth? Personally I don’t think it’s fair to really require *equal* responsibility, although I understand the instrumental value of it that you’ve explained. I’m also worried that your proposal would hinder international collaboration as well as single-country large collaborations that collect data from many sites, because it’s hard to see how people at one site can really vouch for the data at another site.

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