Authorship policy
Authorship on this platform is defined by one standard: the authorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). They are the canonical definition used in our code, our copy, our contribution logs, and our certificates.
This page is public and linked from every project, so students, mentors, and program directors are all reading the same rules.
The four ICMJE criteria
A person qualifies for authorship only when all four criteria are met:
- 1
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
- 2
Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content
- 3
Final approval of the version to be published
- 4
Agreement 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
All four, not some
Meeting one or two criteria is a real contribution, but it is not authorship. Contributors who fall short of all four are acknowledged, not listed as authors. Mentors structure stage work so that a student who completes the work honestly has a genuine path to meeting the criteria.
Contribution logs
For every enrollment, the mentor records which of the four criteria the student met and describes what the student actually did. The student sees their own log, and the log is printed on the certificate. No log, no certificate.
No ghostwriting
No deliverable is ever written for a student. The platform sells mentorship and supervision, not finished work. Any project framed as buy-a-paper is suspended by the platform administration.
No paid authorship
Payment buys a seat in a supervised stage: the mentor's time, structured work, and review. It never buys a byline. Authorship follows from logged contribution that meets the four criteria, and from nothing else.
Certificates document contributions
Certificates state what the holder actually did: the stages completed and the ICMJE contributions logged. They carry a unique verification code and a public verification page, and they never carry inflated titles.
Plain-language version for the pilot; a legal review pass is scheduled before scale.