BEST PRACTICES

 

 

The GEN-FISH project aims to follow the best research practices of honesty, accountability, openness, and fairness in the search for and dissemination of knowledge. This includes:

• Maintaining scholarly and scientific rigour at all stages of research
• Keeping complete and accurate records of data, methodologies, and findings, including figures, tables, and images
• Obtaining and referencing permission to use all external published and unpublished work
• Promoting the inclusion of contributions beyond traditional definitions of authorship, such as amplifying expert knowledge of contributors from relevant communities
• Increasing visibility for early-career researchers
• Promoting justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion by not perpetuating harmful power differentials, systemic inequalities, or marginalization by way of any of the following: age; race; colour; ancestry; place of origin; religion; gender expression; gender identity; sex; sex or gender transition status; sexual orientation; marital or family status; physical disability; mental disability; political belief or membership, candidacy, or office in any political or labour organization; or conviction of a criminal or summary conviction offence unrelated to the research.

 

 

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

 

 

Online access to the publications that arise from GEN-FISH research is paramount. We encourage all authors to publish wherever is most appropriate for their work, but offer the following requirements, as outlined by Genome Canada:

• Submit manuscripts to a journal that offers immediate open access or offers open access within six months of publication
• Submit manuscripts to a journal that automatically deposits publications in appropriate repositories (e.g., PubMed Central) immediately or within six months of publication
• If a manuscript is submitted to a journal that does not offer open access itself, the journal must allow self-archiving of the peer-reviewed manuscript in an open access institutional repository within six months of publication

We recognize that publishing open access can be a significant expense. Please reach out to Project Support to inquire about available project funds to support publishing, or please consider publishing a pre-print of your study (e.g., bioRxiv.org). Additionally, copies of GEN-FISH papers may be published on personal websites and showcased centrally on www.gen-fish.ca.

 

 

GENERAL GUIDELINES FOR PI’S

 

 

Principal Investigators will be leading research aimed at answering questions about particular aspects of the GEN-FISH Activities (e.g., eDNA, genomics, GE³LS, fish performance). These PIs have the right to publish as many detailed papers about these systems as is reasonable. They likewise have the right to choose co-authors for these papers based on their contribution. We strongly encourage PIs to use the guideline for academic authorship outlined by Miles, Renedo, and Marston (2021), as well as the expanded CRediT system, as described by Brand et al. (2015) and modified by Cooke et al. (2020).

We suggest the following authorship formula:

• First author(s) should be those who write the manuscript and can defend all aspects of the paper; this will generally be a student, or a PI in the case of an overview or synthesis paper.
• Middle authors should be ordered by contribution and generally favoring students, early-career researchers, or non-academic co-producers.
• Final author should be the lead PI(s) of the Activity under which the work in the manuscript was performed.
• Author contributions statements (expanded CRediT) and appropriate acknowledgements of all non-author contributors should be included.

For easy reference, the full GEN-FISH contribution & authorship guidelines and quick checklist are available for download below.