https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03 ... 200-papers
Camille Noûs first appeared on the research scene 1 year ago, as a signatory to an open letter protesting French science policy. Since then, Noûs has been an author on 180 journal papers, in fields as disparate as astrophysics, molecular biology, and ecology, and is racking up citations.
But Noûs is not a real person. The name—intentionally added to papers, sometimes without the knowledge of journal editors—is meant to personify collective efforts in science and to protest individualism, according to RogueESR, a French research advocacy group that dreamed up the character. But the campaign is naïve and ethically questionable, says Lisa Rasmussen, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. It flouts the basic principle of taking responsibility alongside the credit of authorship, she says. And some journal editors are balking at going along with the protest.
But of course, the evil hypocrites that steal your research and then sell it back to you have something to say about it:
Some authors, like Lansberg, did not inform editors that Noûs is not a real person. A spokesperson for Scientific Reports told Science that “concerns have been raised” about authorship on a paper in the journal that lists Noûs, and the journal is investigating. And a paper in Physical Review B has published a correction stating that the inclusion of Noûs’s name was contrary to journal policy, and that it had been removed.
