CDGN Guidance on Laboratory Authorship for publication of Multi-jurisdictional outbreaks and other incidences of public health significance across jurisdictions.
The NHMRC document Authorship: A guide supporting the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (1) recommends that authorship arrangements should be formalised. This CDGN guidance document is not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive around authorship arrangements for publications involving CDGN work but forms a guideline for expectations and engagement of public health laboratories when preparing multi-jurisdictional outbreaks, incidents of public health significance or compiled laboratory surveillance data for publication.
Multi-jurisdictional outbreaks (MJOI’s) are defined as outbreaks that utilise substantial resources from more than one state or territory to detect, investigate and mitigate. This can include cases in more than one state or territory, cases in one state or territory related to a food product or incident in another state or territory or a large point source outbreak with many cases from multiple jurisdictions.
From a laboratory perspective, an outbreak investigation typically involves in depth analysis of patient specimens or isolates cultured from patients as well often environmental, food and/or water testing and characterisation of subsequence positive detections. This data is provided in a manner of formats and reports to public health bodies including jurisdictional public health units, state communicable disease bodies and/or national committees such as OzFoodNet and the Commonwealth Department of Health.
In the instance of MJOI’s or enhanced surveillance requests, jurisdictional laboratories may contribute data, be this clinical or environmental or background surveillance data to a “lead” laboratory or jurisdiction, through which the investigation, reporting and documentation are coordinated.
The ability to provide outbreak or surveillance data represents significant investment by the jurisdictional laboratory as these tests arise from expansion of testing capabilities, capital expenditure in equipment and staff, robust validation, expensive accreditation processes, engagement with clinical governance and ongoing quality efforts. Therefore, provision of a single genomic sequence to an investigation can represent substantial laboratory effort.
CDGN therefore recommends that all laboratories who have contributed data to a multi-jurisdictional outbreaks and other incidences of public health significance across jurisdictions should be given the opportunity to participate in publications focused on the investigation or where laboratory data is used in the publication.
The recommended process when a MJOI/public health incident involving laboratory data is to be written up is as follows:
Initiating authors should contact, via email, the scientists and/or clinical microbiologist named in the data reports/releases/emails and explain the intent to publish. These names may not be evident in the event of a MJOI where one coordinating or “lead” jurisdictional laboratory has released the laboratory report. In which case, initiating authors can request the best contact details of other involved jurisdictional laboratories through the lead laboratory.
Use contact details provided to contact and determine the final list of names of laboratory members from each jurisdictional laboratory who are appropriate to be included in the publication. Liaise early in the write up with named laboratory members around sequence uploads to public repositories and any governance or ethical approvals that may be required.
Ensure named laboratory members have opportunity to contribute to the draft manuscript and figures. Note that figures provided in the original investigation reports/communications may not be appropriate for publication and that laboratories will likely wish to reproduce these.
Be aware that some data used in a public health response or report may not be considered suitable for publication and laboratories may request exclusion of particular samples or details.
Guidelines around appropriate laboratory members to be considered as named authors:
Jurisdictional laboratories must ensure that named laboratory members for authorship have contributed to the outbreak investigation data/interpretation, and in line with the NHMRC Authorship guide and the OzFoodNet MJOI Guidelines (2), also make a “sufficient contribution to the paper” itself during manuscript preparation and review.
Jurisdictional laboratories may consider some laboratory members or data contributors are better named in the Acknowledgment section rather than as authors and should communicate this to the initiating authors.
References
A guide supporting the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. 2019. National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Universities Australia. Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
Guidelines for the epidemiological investigation of multi-jurisdictional outbreaks that are potentially foodborne. 2017. OzFoodNet. https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/BA8ABBB4031EF7B6CA25801A00203B3C/$File/guide-epi-invest-multi-jurisdictional.pdf
Version 1. Published 22/03/2021.