Core Facility Staff Authorship: Where's the Line?

Core-facility staff who run imaging, sequencing, flow cytometry, proteomics, or other shared-resource instruments sit in one of the most common gray zones in authorship policy. Routine, fee-for-service operation of an instrument is service work, credited with a named acknowledgment. But the same staff scientist frequently also helps design the experiment, writes or adapts analysis code, develops a non-standard acquisition protocol, or interprets the resulting data — contributions that can independently satisfy the same authorship test applied to any other collaborator. There is no rule that resolves this by job title, facility type, or billing category alone. What resolves it is applying the ICMJE four-criteria authorship test to the actual work performed on a given manuscript, the same test used for any other potential author.

Why this is a recurring hard case

Methods sections routinely compress a core facility’s involvement into a single unattributed sentence — “samples were imaged using a confocal microscope at the XYZ Imaging Core” — even in cases where a named staff scientist chose the acquisition parameters, built a custom analysis pipeline for that specific dataset, or advised on the experimental design before data collection began. Fee-for-service billing pays for instrument time and routine technical labor; it does not, by itself, describe or limit the intellectual content of what the staff member actually did. Two projects that use the same core facility and the same instrument can land on opposite sides of the authorship line depending entirely on whether the facility scientist’s actual involvement was routine execution or substantive intellectual contribution.

This is a close relative of the question CASRAI’s guide on biostatistician authorship addresses for statistical collaborators, but the facility-staff case is usually more complex to resolve because it typically involves ongoing, hands-on technical and analytical work across a project’s lifetime, rather than a single, identifiable act like providing a reagent, cell line, or animal model. That guide covers materials only; this one covers the separate question of core-facility personnel’s own service, operational, and analytical work.

Applying the ICMJE four-part test to core-facility work

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that authorship rest on all four of the following criteria being met, not merely one:

Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work.
Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content.
Final approval of the version to be published.
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including ensuring questions about accuracy or integrity are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Applied to core-facility service work: operating a standard, previously validated protocol chosen by the research team, and delivering raw data or images without further interpretation, does not by itself satisfy the first criterion — it is routine technical execution, not a substantial contribution to design, analysis, or interpretation. Designing a novel acquisition strategy for the specific research question, adapting or developing a non-standard protocol, building a custom analysis or bioinformatics pipeline, or substantively interpreting the resulting data can satisfy it. But meeting the first criterion alone is still not enough — ICMJE requires all four, which is also why a facility scientist who contributed substantially to analysis but declines to review the manuscript, or is unwilling to be accountable for the work, does not qualify for authorship on that basis.

ICMJE is explicit that this determination is the collective responsibility of the author group, not of an editor, and not of the facility director — it has to be made project by project, based on what actually happened on that specific manuscript, not applied as a blanket rule for “core facility staff” as a category. ICMJE’s companion recommendation covers the other side of this line directly: contributors who provided technical help, routine services, or material or facility support, but who do not meet all four authorship criteria, should be named in an acknowledgments section rather than listed as authors.

Where the line usually falls in practice

The published institutional guidance discussed below converges, in practice, on a similar operational distinction, even though none of it replaces the ICMJE test itself:

Typically acknowledgment only: running an established, previously validated protocol selected by the research team; routine sample processing or preparation; standard instrument time billed as a service; delivering raw data, images, or reads without interpretive analysis.
Typically authorship-relevant: contributing to experimental design or hypothesis framing before data collection; developing or substantively adapting a novel protocol, acquisition scheme, or analysis/bioinformatics pipeline specific to the project; interpreting results in a way that shapes the paper’s conclusions; drafting or substantively revising methods or results text describing that work.

This is guidance for spotting which side of the ICMJE test a given contribution is likely to land on — it is not a mechanical substitute for applying the test itself to what actually happened on a specific project.

How real institutions have drawn this line

A growing number of universities and individual core facilities have published their own guidance to operationalize ICMJE for this exact scenario, precisely because it recurs so often and causes real friction between research teams and shared-resource staff:

Penn State published dedicated Core Facilities Authorship Guidelines in 2025 through its Office for Research Protections, developed jointly with core facility staff and including appendices of facility-specific worked examples. Its core guiding principle: staff who function as part of a research team should be considered for authorship even when they are not formally members of the PI’s “home” lab — sitting alongside Penn State’s broader institutional authorship policy.
Northwestern University’s Biological Imaging Facility (BIF) publishes its own authorship and acknowledgment guidelines, describing its scientists as “partners in the advancement of knowledge” who deserve co-authorship when they make a substantial intellectual or experimental contribution. It specifically calls out that when a core scientist contributed to conception or design, or provided “non-routine” training or services, but did not meet every ICMJE criterion, whether to extend authorship is left to the PI’s discretion — distinct from BIF’s baseline request that any use of the facility at all be acknowledged by RRID.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s BioFrontiers Advanced Light Microscopy Core documents its position on its Imaging Wiki’s “Facility Guidelines” pages, describing its personnel as scientists who should be credited as co-authors for qualifying contributions, with worked examples of what counts toward authorship alongside standard acknowledgment-statement language (including the facility’s RRID) for use regardless of whether authorship applies.
EPFL’s Flow Cytometry Core Facility (FCCF) publishes a policy stating that publication co-authorship “should be considered” whenever its staff make significant contributions to the design of experiments or research projects — separate from its baseline acknowledgment request for any use of its equipment, services, or staff expertise.
ABRF (the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities), the main professional society for core-facility and shared-resource scientists, treats this as a field-wide professional-recognition issue rather than a single institution’s internal policy question, reflecting how widespread the ambiguity is across imaging, genomics, proteomics, flow cytometry, and other shared-resource cores.

A common thread across all of this institutional guidance: none of it substitutes for the ICMJE test — each operationalizes it for the specific circumstances of facility-based contribution. Each also frames facility acknowledgment, independent of the authorship question, as a practical necessity: citations and acknowledgments are frequently what shared facilities use to justify continued institutional and grant funding, which is a separate concern from whether a specific staff member individually qualifies as an author on a specific paper.

Mapping facility-staff contributions to CRediT roles

Even when full authorship criteria are not met, the CRediT Contributor Roles Taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) gives a structured way to record exactly what a facility scientist contributed, instead of collapsing it into an unattributed “samples were processed at the Core” sentence. Roles commonly relevant to core-facility work include:

Investigation — conducting the imaging, sequencing, or data-collection experiments.
Methodology — developing or adapting the acquisition or experimental protocol.
Software — custom analysis scripts or pipelines built for the project.
Formal Analysis — statistical or computational analysis of the resulting data.
Data Curation — managing, annotating, or preserving the resulting dataset.
Resources — instrument or facility access itself. As with materials provision covered in CASRAI’s reagent and cell-line sharing guide, this role alone, without an accompanying intellectual contribution, does not meet ICMJE’s authorship bar.

Practical steps

Bring the core facility scientist into the design conversation before data collection begins when the work is genuinely novel or non-standard — the earlier a potential authorship question is visible, the less likely it becomes a dispute at submission time.
Document facility involvement as it happens, for example in a facility use agreement or project log describing what the core will design, build, or analyze, rather than reconstructing the record retrospectively when the manuscript is drafted.
When the contribution does not meet the authorship bar, use the CRediT Resources role (or another applicable role) plus a proper named acknowledgment, including the facility’s RRID where it maintains one — this is what institutions like Northwestern BIF and CU Boulder explicitly ask for regardless of the authorship outcome.
Facility directors should maintain a written authorship and acknowledgment policy, as Northwestern BIF, CU Boulder’s Imaging Core, EPFL’s FCCF, and now Penn State institution-wide all do, so expectations are set before a conflict arises rather than during peer review.
Remember payment does not settle the question either way: being compensated through a facility’s fee-for-service structure neither confers nor forfeits authorship. What matters is the nature of the contribution measured against all four ICMJE criteria, not whether the person was paid for their time.

Frequently asked questions

Does running a standard, published protocol on a core facility’s instrument ever count toward authorship?

On its own, usually not. Executing an established protocol chosen by the research team is routine technical service, which is exactly the category ICMJE directs toward acknowledgment rather than authorship. It can become authorship-relevant if the facility scientist also substantially contributed to designing the experiment, adapting the protocol non-trivially for the specific research question, or interpreting the resulting data.

Who decides whether a core facility scientist should be a co-author — the PI or the facility director?

Per ICMJE, it is the collective responsibility of the author group, not an editor and not the facility’s own leadership, to determine that everyone named as an author meets all four criteria. Facility-specific guidance (like Northwestern BIF’s) is written to help the PI and facility scientist reach that determination together for a given project, not to hand the decision to the facility.

Can a core facility staff member be credited under CRediT’s Resources role instead of being listed as an author?

Yes, and this is the standard way to formally document facility or instrument access that does not rise to authorship. A CRediT statement and an acknowledgment are not mutually exclusive with declining authorship — they are the correct mechanism for crediting contribution that falls short of the ICMJE bar.

Does being paid for the facility’s services disqualify staff from authorship?

No. Compensation through a fee-for-service or recharge structure is a billing arrangement, not an authorship criterion. Authorship is determined by whether the actual contribution meets ICMJE’s four criteria, regardless of whether the person was paid for their time.

Does this only apply to imaging and sequencing cores, or does it extend to other shared-resource facilities?

The same reasoning applies to any shared-resource facility — proteomics, flow cytometry, biostatistics, structural biology, animal, and other cores — wherever staff may contribute anywhere along the spectrum from routine service to substantive intellectual work. ABRF’s professional membership spans exactly this range of facility types for that reason.