2026 BTSCON: Who Gets Credit? Building FAIR Infrastructure for Recognition in Large-Scale Consortia

Big Team Science Conference talk: Who Gets Credit? Building FAIR Infrastructure for Recognition in Large-Scale Consortia Presenter: Tanya Brown Large consortia produce more than papers: preregistrations, shared protocols, datasets, code, and dozens of other outputs, each shaped by contributors whose work rarely appears on a byline. This talk draws on COGITATE, a 12-institution, 3-continent adversarial collaboration testing rival theories of consciousness, to examine what happens when a big team science project tries to make credit as rigorous as its methods. I'll walk through the FAIR Workflows project, a proof-of-concept built with DataCite and funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, that used COGITATE as a testbed for linking every research output to the people, institutions, and funding behind it through persistent identifiers (ORCID, ROR, DOIs). The result is a PID graph of 30+ connected outputs, viewable at project, person, and community scale, that lets a PhD student answer ""what is the impact of my science?"" beyond a publication count, and lets a senior scientist generate a full contribution record for reporting or a grant application. I'll also cover where existing tools like the CRediT taxonomy fall short for large teams, and what we learned building this infrastructure iteratively, alongside the project, rather than retrofitting it after the fact. The talk closes with Consciousness Commons, a new initiative building directly on FAIR Workflows that engages early career researchers to adopt these practices in their own team projects. It's translational work happening in real time, aimed at growing adoption beyond COGITATE so more researchers can benefit from this workflow in their own collaborations. recorded Oct 8, 2026 bigteamscienceconference.github.io