Policies
Policies on User Fees, Authorship and Collaboration
The Tufts Proteomics Core facility, (a.k.a “Tufts Proteomics”), part of the Tufts University Core Facility, is a self-supporting facility, receiving no funding from grants or the university. The Tufts Proteomics Core facility does not have funding specifically designated to support collaborative work. Instead, to support its operation the facility must rely heavily on charges from labs who use the services and who do have funding to support the research. For this reason, all investigators must arrange payment before submitting samples to the Tufts Proteomics Core facility. The sample submission forms detail the payment options. We suggest that users of the facility include the costs of protein analysis in any grant proposals involving such research. A list of user fees can be found on the Tufts University Core Facility web (see the proteomic pages of the website: www.tucf.org) and the Tufts Proteomics website (proteomics.med.tufts.edu). We will be happy to provide an estimate of funding required and a letter of collaboration for grant proposals that specify an appropriate percentage of the grant budget for protein analysis with the Tufts Proteomics Core facility. We regret any inconvenience this may cause to our colleagues, but our financial realities require this policy.
Acknowledgment and Authorship
We at the Tufts Proteomics Core facility follow the guidelines established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and similar organizations as discussed by Huth (Huth, E. J., Guidelines on Authorship of Medical Papers, Annals Int. Med. 104, 1986, 269-274). In general, these guidelines suggest that if scientists from the Tufts Proteomics Core facility have helped to design or conceive the experiments, have done significantly more than the typical data analysis and interpretation of data, or both, they should be coauthors of papers that use data generated by the facility. In this case, facility scientists should participate in drafting the paper or revising it for critically important content, and give final approval of the version to be published. Characterization of posttranslational modifications on proteins, and in some cases, extensive or multiple protein identifications are not routine, generally require extensive data interpretation, and in most cases constitute contributions meriting co-authorship. Simple acquisitions of mass spectra or routine protein identifications alone normally do not merit co-authorship but should be acknowledged (see below). If you are uncertain about co-authorship or have any questions or concerns about this, please discuss this issue with the facility director (Jon P. DeGnore) before submitting your samples for analysis.
If data from the Tufts Proteomics Core facility is used in a publication and the facility scientists are not coauthors, please acknowledge the Tufts Proteomics Core facility in the Acknowledgments section of the publication. Please send us a reprint of the paper, or an e-mail including the reference information for the publication. This is important in the facilities’ own grant applications for new instrumentation and will help the facility obtain funding to keep user fees lower than they would be without this funding.
Collaboration
If a project requires extensive mass spectrometry analysis, in some cases a collaboration between the Tufts Proteomics Core and another lab may be established. Collaborations usually entail co-authorship and in some cases modified fee structures, especially when numerous analyses of a similar nature must be carried out so that economy of scale may be achieved. In all cases, collaborations can only be established by mutual agreement of the heads the labs involved, including the director of the Tufts Proteomics Core (Jon P. DeGnore). It should be noted that since the Tufts Proteomics Core is a self-supporting facility with limited time and budget, projects that generate revenue and necessary tasks to keep the facility operation (such as instrument maintenance) will generally take precedence over collaborative projects. The collaborative project agreement comes with the expectation that there will be a minimum of 2 papers published yearly with the Tufts Proteomics Core facility staff as coauthors. Upon the discretion of the director of the Tufts Proteomics Core (Jon P. DeGnore), a lack of coauthored publications is a valid reason for ending the collaborative relationship.
The text above was heavily paraphrased from the policy of Thomas Neubert, Director of the NYU Protein Analysis Facility
June 13, 2008
Jon P. DeGnore |
