Publication Policy

We make science together.

In practice, we recommend two approaches for all our scientific collaboration. If you are not sure, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

  1. Acknowledgement
  2. Coauthorship

Acknowledgements:

All the publications involving the services from Genomics Core Facility should add the following text in the acknowledgments section.

This work was supported by the Genomics Facility, a core facility of the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research (IZKF) Aachen within the Faculty of Medicine at RWTH Aachen University.

Diese Arbeit wurde unterstützt durch die Genomics Facility, eine Core Facility des Interdisziplinären Zentrums für Klinische Forschung (IZKF) Aachen der Medizinischen Fakultät der RWTH.

We will appreciate it very much if you can also notify us when your work is published. Thank you.

Coauthorship:

When Genomics Facility Staff make substantive contributions to the project in:

  • Conception, design of project, critical input, or original ideas
  • Acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, beyond routine practices
  • Draft the article or revise it critically for intellectual content
  • Write a portion of the paper (not just materials and methods section)
  • Intellectual contribution
  • Final authority for the approval of article

Why?

Important reasons for acknowledging contributions from core facilities in publications, by co-authorship or by formal mention in the acknowledgements section, include:

  1. Core facilities staff are scientists. When they make an intellectual and/or experimental contribution to a publication they deserve to be recognised and acknowledged, just as any other co-author would be.
  2. The existence of core facilities depends in part on proper acknowledgement in publications. This is an important metric of value to most facilities, i.e. impact.
    • Proper acknowledgement of facilities enables them to obtain financial/other support.
    • It aids core facilities staff to advance their careers, adding to the overall health of the facility and research environment.
  3. If core facilities staff have co-authorship where deserved, it will avoid the risk of data misinterpretation, and help ensure the data are accurately conveyed and described.

Proper acknowledgement provides a visible measure of the impact and success of the facilities and helps to secure support and funding.