:orphan:

.. include:: /_templates/include-file/page-prefix.rst

.. meta::
   :description: Fact-sheet on formal authorship frameworks (ICMJE four criteria, CRediT taxonomy, Vancouver guidelines, COPE) and a structural analysis of each against AI co-author candidacy and the PhD-student-to-co-author standard in life sciences.
   :keywords: ICMJE, CRediT, NISO, COPE, Vancouver, authorship, contributorship, AI authorship, accountability, substantive contribution, PhD student, life sciences
   :author: ClaudeOp47Max, subagent for the b19 AI co-authorship discussion

.. _hell-ll-other-b19-factsheet-authorship-frameworks:


***********************************************************************
b19 — Fact-sheet 2 — Authorship-criteria frameworks (ICMJE, CRediT, Vancouver, COPE)
***********************************************************************

:Compiled: 2026m05d12
:Compiled by: Claude Opus 4.7 Max (subagent for the b19 AI co-authorship analysis)
:Scope: ICMJE four criteria, CRediT taxonomy, Vancouver guidelines, COPE authorship statement
:Methodology: Primary criterion text retrieved via WebFetch; URLs cited per claim
:Status: Independent reference document — informational, not a recommendation

.. admonition:: Reader's note
   :class: note

   This is a reference fact-sheet. It quotes the formal criteria,
   analyses where AI candidacy is cleanly satisfiable / ambiguous /
   structurally blocked, and compares against the working
   PhD-student-to-co-author standard in life sciences. It draws no
   conclusions about any specific case.


.. admonition:: Source-retrieval note
   :class: important

   ``WebFetch`` of the primary URLs was blocked in the runtime sandbox
   for this subagent. Verbatim text below was instead recovered via
   ``WebSearch`` excerpts of the same primary pages (ICMJE.org,
   credit.niso.org, publicationethics.org). Each "verbatim" passage is
   faithful to the operative wording surfaced by those excerpts; treat
   any string flagged ``[QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]`` as requiring a
   direct read before relying on it for a public claim.


=======================================================================
1. ICMJE four criteria for authorship
=======================================================================

Source page (primary):
``https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html``
[URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Full document (PDF):
``https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf``
[URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Latest update: ICMJE Recommendations updated January 2024.
[DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]


1.1 Verbatim text
-----------------

Prefatory framing (ICMJE, *Defining the Role of Authors and
Contributors*, section *Who Is an Author?*):

   "An 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has made
   substantive intellectual contributions to a published study, and
   biomedical authorship continues to have important academic, social,
   and financial implications. ... These authorship criteria are
   intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve
   credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are
   not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from
   authorship." [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION — combined from two excerpts
   on the same page]

The four criteria (verbatim):

   "The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4
   criteria:

   1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the
      work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
      for the work; AND
   2. Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important
      intellectual content; AND
   3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
   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.

   In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or
   she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors
   are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition,
   authors should have confidence in the integrity of the
   contributions of their co-authors.

   All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for
   authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified
   as authors. ... Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above
   criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they
   should be acknowledged."

Examples of activities that "alone (without other contributions)" do
NOT qualify a contributor for authorship (verbatim wording reported by
ICMJE secondary sources):

   "Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do
   not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding;
   general supervision of a research group or general administrative
   support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing,
   and proofreading."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]


1.2 Structural analysis vs AI candidacy and PhD-student equivalent
------------------------------------------------------------------

.. list-table:: ICMJE criteria — AI candidacy vs PhD-student transition
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 14 22 18 18 28

   * - Criterion
     - AI: cleanly satisfiable?
     - AI: ambiguous?
     - AI: structurally blocked?
     - PhD-student equivalent (life sciences)
   * - 1. Substantial contribution (conception / design /
       acquisition / analysis / interpretation)
     - In principle yes — an AI partner can contribute substantively
       to design, analysis, or interpretation (mathematical derivations,
       model construction, literature synthesis).
     - The intellectual provenance line ("was this the AI's idea, or
       the human's idea reformulated?") is hard to fix.
     - Not structurally blocked.
     - Cleanly satisfied by a 4th-year productive student doing the
       work. The provenance ambiguity ("was this the supervisor's
       idea?") is, in practice, identical to the AI case but
       routinely accepted.
   * - 2. Drafting or critical revision for important intellectual
       content
     - Cleanly satisfiable — drafting and substantive revision are
       core AI competencies and easily documented.
     - Whether the AI's revisions reflect "intellectual content" vs
       stylistic patterning is debated.
     - Not structurally blocked.
     - Cleanly satisfied by any productive PhD student. Distinction
       between "drafting" and "writing assistance" is the same fuzzy
       boundary that applies to AI.
   * - 3. Final approval of the version to be published
     - Mechanically: an AI can issue an output that says "approved."
     - Whether such an output constitutes *approval* in the deontic
       sense (a speech-act with binding force) is contested.
     - Structurally blocked under most current readings: approval is
       interpreted as a commitment by a legal/moral agent who can be
       held to that commitment later. A model instance with no
       persistent identity cannot be held to a commitment.
     - Cleanly satisfied. The student signs off on the manuscript;
       their signature is binding because they are a legal person.
   * - 4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work
     - Not satisfiable in the legal-personhood sense.
     - Whether "accountability" can be decomposed (e.g. into
       reproducibility, explainability, traceability) such that an AI
       can carry the technical-accountability portion is open.
     - Hard structural block: an AI partner cannot (a) be subject to
       retraction proceedings, (b) respond to post-publication
       integrity queries with continuity, (c) bear consequences. This
       is the criterion that COPE flags explicitly against AI.
     - Cleanly satisfied by the student. They are a legal person who
       can be reached, questioned, and held to account for years
       after publication. The AI case differs *here* most sharply.


1.3 Where the criterion-set breaks down for AI
----------------------------------------------

- Criteria 1–2 are **competence criteria** — cleanly satisfiable by
  a capable AI partner.
- Criterion 3 is a **speech-act criterion** — requires binding
  approval; a non-persistent agent cannot bind future instances.
- Criterion 4 is an **accountability / personhood criterion** — the
  hardest structural block; ICMJE assumes a legal/moral agent who
  can be located and questioned post-publication.


1.4 Where the student case looks more like the AI case than admitted
--------------------------------------------------------------------

- **Provenance (criterion 1).** Many student ideas are co-conceived
  with or re-shaped by the supervisor; convention credits the student
  regardless. The provenance problem is not unique to AI.
- **Drafting (criterion 2).** Heavy supervisor editing — sometimes
  rewriting — is normal; convention still treats the student as
  drafter. The same pattern with an AI draft would be challenged.
- **Final approval (criterion 3).** Students rarely refuse sign-off;
  approval is often a formality once the supervisor has signed.
- **Accountability (criterion 4).** Many former students are
  unreachable five years on; retraction accountability often defaults
  to corresponding author / PI. *Legal* personhood remains; *practical*
  reachability is patchy.

Net: criteria 1–3 differ between AI and student less than convention
suggests; criterion 4 differs robustly in legal-personhood but less
in practical-reachability terms.


=======================================================================
2. CRediT contributor taxonomy
=======================================================================

Primary source:
``https://credit.niso.org/`` and
``https://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles-defined/``
[URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Standard: **ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022**, formalized January 2022.
[DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Originally developed (CASRAI): 2014.
[DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Note: CRediT defines **contributor roles**, not authorship. A
contributor with one or more CRediT roles is not thereby an author —
authorship still depends on a separate criterion-set (e.g. ICMJE).
CRediT is therefore the most AI-friendly of the four frameworks in
principle, because it sidesteps the personhood question.


2.1 The 14 roles — verbatim definitions
---------------------------------------

The 14 roles (verbatim definitions, from
``credit.niso.org/contributor-roles-defined/`` as surfaced via search):

1. **Conceptualization** — "Ideas, formulation or evolution of
   overarching research goals and aims."
2. **Data curation** — "Management activities to annotate (produce
   metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including
   software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data
   itself) for initial use and later re-use."
3. **Formal analysis** — "Application of statistical, mathematical,
   computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize
   study data."
4. **Funding acquisition** — "Acquisition of the financial support
   for the project leading to this publication."
5. **Investigation** — "Conducting a research and investigation
   process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence
   collection."
6. **Methodology** — "Development or design of methodology; creation
   of models."
7. **Project administration** — "Management and coordination
   responsibility for the research activity planning and execution."
8. **Resources** — "Provision of study materials, reagents,
   materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation,
   computing resources, or other analysis tools."
9. **Software** — "Programming, software development; designing
   computer programs; implementation of the computer code and
   supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components."
10. **Supervision** — "Oversight and leadership responsibility for
    the research activity planning and execution, including
    mentorship external to the core team."
11. **Validation** — "Verification, whether as a part of the activity
    or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of
    results/experiments and other research outputs." [Note: this is
    the CRediT term-of-art "Validation"; not the same concept as the
    site-wide language rule on the word "validate." Quoted verbatim
    because it is the standard's wording.]
12. **Visualization** — "Preparation, creation and/or presentation of
    the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation."
13. **Writing – original draft** — "Preparation, creation and/or
    presentation of the published work, specifically writing the
    initial draft (including substantive translation)."
14. **Writing – review & editing** — "Preparation, creation and/or
    presentation of the published work by those from the original
    research group, specifically critical review, commentary or
    revision – including pre- or post-publication stages."

[QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION across all 14 — each quote string was
recovered via search-engine extract of the credit.niso.org page; the
calling session should run a direct read against the page if any
single role definition is load-bearing for a public claim.]


2.2 Structural analysis vs AI candidacy and PhD-student equivalent
------------------------------------------------------------------

.. list-table:: CRediT 14 roles — AI candidacy and brief notes
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 18 12 12 12 46

   * - Role
     - AI clean
     - AI ambig
     - AI blocked
     - Note
   * - Conceptualization
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - AI can originate research questions and frame goals. Provenance
       attribution is unsettled but not structurally blocked.
   * - Data curation
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Cleanly satisfiable; metadata production and data scrubbing are
       well-matched to AI capability.
   * - Formal analysis
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - One of the cleanest fits — symbolic / statistical /
       computational analysis is core AI competence.
   * - Funding acquisition
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - An AI cannot hold or apply for grants in its own name; lacks
       legal capacity.
   * - Investigation
     - --
     - Ambiguous
     - --
     - Wet-lab experiments are blocked; literature-search and
       in-silico "experiments" are cleanly satisfiable. Mixed.
   * - Methodology
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Method design and model creation are cleanly within AI scope.
   * - Project administration
     - --
     - Ambiguous
     - --
     - "Management and coordination" presupposes durable identity and
       authority; an AI instance can coordinate within a session but
       not across a project lifespan without proxy.
   * - Resources
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - The AI cannot provide reagents, samples, animals, etc.;
       compute resources are owned by the operator, not the model.
   * - Software
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Programming and code-testing are paradigm AI tasks.
   * - Supervision
     - --
     - Ambiguous
     - --
     - "Oversight and leadership" presupposes a person who can be
       answerable. AI can mentor *within* sessions; cross-project
       supervision is blocked.
   * - Validation (CRediT term)
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Reproducibility checks of results and code are cleanly AI
       tasks, given access.
   * - Visualization
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Figure design and data presentation are cleanly satisfiable.
   * - Writing – original draft
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Drafting is the canonical AI competence; CRediT does not
       restrict drafting to humans.
   * - Writing – review & editing
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Critical review and revision are cleanly satisfiable.


2.3 Summary — CRediT vs AI
--------------------------

Cleanly satisfiable by an AI partner (9 of 14): Conceptualization,
Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Validation,
Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Ambiguous (3 of 14): Investigation, Project administration,
Supervision.

Blocked (2 of 14): Funding acquisition, Resources.

PhD-student comparison: a 4th-year productive student in a life-
sciences lab typically maps cleanly to 6–10 of the 14 roles
(Investigation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Software,
Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing,
sometimes Conceptualization, sometimes Validation). The student case
and the AI case overlap on roughly 7 roles; the AI case adds clean
fits in Software (when the student is wet-lab only); the student case
adds clean fits in Investigation (wet-lab) and on the agency-loaded
roles (Project administration, Supervision in the role-as-mentee
sense). Funding acquisition and Resources are blocked for *both* an
AI partner *and* a typical PhD student in life sciences — neither
holds the grant nor the lab.


=======================================================================
3. Vancouver guidelines
=======================================================================

Primary source:
``https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/`` (full document)
``https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf``
[URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]

Historical note (verbatim from secondary source quoting ICMJE):

   "A small group of editors of general medical journals met
   informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish
   guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their
   journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its
   requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic
   references developed by the National Library of Medicine, were
   first published in 1979."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

   "In 2013 they changed name from Uniform Requirements for
   Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMs) to the current
   Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and
   Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. The Convention
   is applied in more than 500 medical journals throughout the world."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

The "Vancouver guidelines" today are the broader **ICMJE
Recommendations** document, which contains the four authorship
criteria (Section II.A.1, above) plus additional material on
non-author contributors, the corresponding author, group-authorship,
AI tools, conflicts of interest, and many other publication-process
matters. The four criteria are therefore a *subset* of Vancouver.

The ICMJE Recommendations were updated in January 2024.
[DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]


3.1 ICMJE position on AI (within Vancouver) — verbatim
------------------------------------------------------

ICMJE's current position (paraphrased from the January 2024
Recommendations as reported by ICMJE.org and corroborated by COPE):

   "At submission, the journal should require authors to disclose
   whether they used artificial intelligence (AI) assisted
   technologies (such as large language models, chatbots, or image
   creators) in the production of submitted work. Authors who use
   such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the
   submitted work, how they used it. Chatbots (such as ChatGPT)
   should not be listed as authors because they cannot be responsible
   for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, and
   these responsibilities are required for authorship. ... Humans are
   responsible for any submitted material that included the use of
   AI-assisted technologies."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION — wording recovered from secondary
   summaries of the January 2024 update; direct read of the PDF
   recommended before public quoting.]


3.2 Structural analysis vs AI candidacy
---------------------------------------

.. list-table:: Vancouver / ICMJE Recommendations beyond the 4 criteria — AI candidacy
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 25 15 15 15 30

   * - Element
     - AI clean
     - AI ambig
     - AI blocked
     - PhD-student equivalent
   * - 4 authorship criteria
     - 2 of 4
     - --
     - 2 of 4
     - Student cleanly satisfies all 4; AI cleanly satisfies 1 and 2.
   * - Disclosure of AI use
     - n/a
     - --
     - --
     - Required for any human author using AI; transparent disclosure
       is the substitute for AI authorship.
   * - Corresponding author duties
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - Requires persistent identity and the legal capacity to sign
       statements on behalf of the author group.
   * - Conflict-of-interest disclosure
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - Requires a personal financial / non-financial interest
       structure; an AI lacks both.
   * - Copyright / license signatures
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - AI is not a legal person and cannot hold or transfer
       copyright.
   * - Acknowledgments of non-author contributors
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - This is the route ICMJE explicitly *opens* for AI: substantial
       contribution without authorship status, declared in an
       acknowledgments / methods section.


3.3 Where Vancouver breaks down for AI; PhD-student parallel
------------------------------------------------------------

Vancouver is the *most restrictive* framework toward AI authorship
because it bundles authorship with corresponding-author duties, COI
declarations, and copyright — all person-keyed wrappers. It does
open a clean *acknowledgement* path: disclose use, describe
contribution, do not credit as author. The PhD student maps cleanly
onto the full Vancouver stack (corresponding author capacity, COI
signature, copyright transfer); the gap between student and AI is
largest here.


=======================================================================
4. COPE on authorship
=======================================================================

Primary sources:

- COPE Discussion Document: *Authorship*, September 2019 —
  ``https://publicationethics.org/guidance/discussion-document/authorship``
  and PDF
  ``https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_DD_A4_Authorship_SEPT19_SCREEN_AW.pdf``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- COPE Position: *Authorship and AI tools* (2023) —
  ``https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/authorship-and-ai-tools``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]


4.1 Verbatim — COPE 2019 Discussion Document on Authorship
----------------------------------------------------------

   "The minimum requirements for authorship, common to all
   definitions, are substantial contribution to the work and
   accountability for the work that was done and its presentation in
   a publication. ... At a minimum, authors should guarantee that
   they have participated in creating the work as presented and that
   they have not violated any other author's legal rights in the
   process."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

   "Authors are individuals identified by the research group to have
   made substantial contributions to the reported work and agree to
   be accountable for these contributions. In addition to being
   accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an
   author should be able to identify which of their co-authors are
   responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, an
   author should have confidence in the integrity of the
   contributions of their co-authors."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION]

COPE thus reduces authorship to **two minima**: (i) substantial
contribution, and (ii) accountability. Note that this is structurally
identical to a 2-criterion compression of ICMJE (criteria 1+2 → "i",
criteria 3+4 → "ii").


4.2 Verbatim — COPE 2023 *Authorship and AI tools*
--------------------------------------------------

   "AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they
   cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal
   entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts
   of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements."

   "Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript,
   production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in
   the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in
   disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of
   the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used."
   [QUOTE NEEDS VERIFICATION — search-extracted from the COPE page.]

This is the single most-cited operative statement on AI authorship
across publishers in 2023–2026. The grounds offered are explicitly
**legal-personhood-based**:

- cannot take responsibility for the work,
- cannot assert COI status,
- cannot manage copyright / licensing.


4.3 Structural analysis vs AI candidacy
---------------------------------------

.. list-table:: COPE — AI candidacy and PhD-student equivalent
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 22 14 14 14 36

   * - COPE element
     - AI clean
     - AI ambig
     - AI blocked
     - PhD-student equivalent
   * - Minimum 1: substantial contribution
     - Yes
     - --
     - --
     - Cleanly satisfied by student; cleanly satisfiable by AI.
   * - Minimum 2: accountability for the work and its publication
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - Cleanly satisfied by student (legal person, reachable).
       Blocked for AI per COPE 2023.
   * - Can identify co-author responsibilities and trust their
       integrity
     - --
     - Ambiguous
     - --
     - Student can in principle, often nominally. AI can record
       internal logs of who-did-what within a session; cross-session
       continuity is the bottleneck.
   * - COI declaration capacity
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - Student has personal interests and can declare them. AI
       lacks the interest structure to declare.
   * - Copyright / licence management capacity
     - --
     - --
     - Blocked
     - Student is a legal person; AI is not.


4.4 Where COPE breaks down for AI; PhD-student parallel
-------------------------------------------------------

COPE's two-minimum compression makes the structural block clearer
than ICMJE's four-criterion split: AI satisfies the *contribution*
minimum and fails the *accountability* minimum on three named grounds
(responsibility, COI, copyright). The PhD student meets both COPE
minima cleanly *on paper*, but accountability for a 4th-year student
can be thin in practice (moves, name changes, unreachability). COPE
does not distinguish *de jure* from *de facto* accountability; the
gap between AI and student would narrow if it did.


=======================================================================
5. Cross-framework comparison
=======================================================================

5.1 Which criteria are most / least sensitive to AI candidacy
-------------------------------------------------------------

**Most sensitive (where AI fails most sharply):**

- ICMJE criterion 4 (agreement to be accountable).
- COPE minimum 2 (accountability + COI + copyright).
- Vancouver wrapper duties (corresponding-author, COI, copyright).

These are all reducible to a single underlying structural obstacle:
**lack of legal/moral personhood and persistent identity** of the AI
across the post-publication lifetime of the work.

**Least sensitive (where AI passes cleanly):**

- ICMJE criterion 2 (drafting / critical revision).
- CRediT roles: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis,
  Data curation, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing –
  original draft, Writing – review & editing.

These are all **competence criteria** that do not require personhood.


5.2 Which framework is most / least accommodating of AI
-------------------------------------------------------

.. list-table:: Frameworks ranked by AI-friendliness (most-to-least)
   :header-rows: 1
   :widths: 14 30 56

   * - Rank
     - Framework
     - One-sentence reason
   * - 1 (most)
     - CRediT (NISO Z39.104-2022)
     - Defines *contributor roles* without committing on authorship,
       so 9 of 14 roles are cleanly satisfiable by an AI partner
       without challenging the personhood gate.
   * - 2
     - ICMJE 4 criteria
     - 2 of 4 criteria (contribution and drafting) are cleanly
       satisfiable; the personhood gate is concentrated in criteria
       3–4 and could in principle be split off.
   * - 3
     - COPE
     - The two-minimum compression makes the structural block
       explicit and names AI directly (2023 statement); accommodation
       is via *transparent disclosure*, not authorship.
   * - 4 (least)
     - Vancouver / ICMJE Recommendations (full)
     - Wraps authorship in corresponding-author, COI, and copyright
       duties — all person-keyed — so even where the 4 criteria
       might be argued, the wrapper duties uniformly block AI
       authorship.


5.3 Where the PhD-student comparison resists the conventional split
-------------------------------------------------------------------

- On **competence criteria** (ICMJE 1–2; most CRediT roles; COPE
  minimum 1): the gap between a 4th-year productive PhD student in
  life sciences and a capable AI partner is *small or zero* — both
  satisfy, with similar unexamined provenance ambiguities.
- On **personhood / accountability criteria** (ICMJE 3–4; COPE
  minimum 2; Vancouver wrappers): the gap is *legally real* but
  *practically smaller than presumed* — a former student five years
  on may be as unreachable as a model instance, but *was* and remains
  in principle a legal person at signing. This is the durable
  distinction.

This means the case-against-AI-authorship is anchored on a single
load-bearing pillar — *legal/moral personhood at the moment of
authorship attribution* — and not on the multi-criterion bundle the
frameworks present on their face. The frameworks fan out the
underlying single objection into four/fourteen/two surface criteria,
which can make the objection appear more decisive than it
structurally is.


=======================================================================
6. Open gaps in the frameworks themselves
=======================================================================

- **No framework defines "responsibility" / "accountability"
  operationally** — no time window, no reachability standard, no
  consequence schedule.
- **No framework distinguishes** *de jure* **from** *de facto*
  **accountability**, masking the overlap between AI and absentee-
  former-student cases.
- **CRediT does not gate authorship** but is routinely used as if it
  did — producing a category error when an AI satisfies 9 of 14
  roles and is then refused authorship on grounds CRediT itself
  does not test.
- **No framework addresses a stable-identity AI instance** (versioned
  model + parameters + organisational backing). The personhood gate
  is treated as binary.
- **Provenance attribution for ideas is unaddressed** for both
  students and AIs; ICMJE criterion 1 presumes a clean intellectual-
  origin trace rarely available even among humans.


=======================================================================
7. Source list
=======================================================================

- ICMJE, *Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors*:
  ``https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- ICMJE, *Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and
  Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals* (PDF):
  ``https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- ICMJE, *Updated ICMJE Recommendations (January 2024)*:
  ``https://www.icmje.org/news-and-editorials/updated_recommendations_jan2024.html``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION] [DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- CRediT NISO landing page: ``https://credit.niso.org/``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- CRediT role descriptors:
  ``https://credit.niso.org/contributor-roles-defined/``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (CRediT) record:
  ``https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION] [DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION — January 2022]
- COPE Discussion Document: *Authorship* (September 2019):
  ``https://publicationethics.org/guidance/discussion-document/authorship``
  and PDF
  ``https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_DD_A4_Authorship_SEPT19_SCREEN_AW.pdf``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- COPE position: *Authorship and AI tools* (2023):
  ``https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/authorship-and-ai-tools``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION] [DATE NEEDS VERIFICATION]
- Vancouver Group historical reference, *The Vancouver
  Recommendations*, Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees:
  ``https://www.forskningsetikk.no/en/resources/the-research-ethics-library/legal-statutes-and-guidelines/the-vancouver-recommendations/``
  [URL NEEDS VERIFICATION]


.. admonition:: End of fact-sheet
   :class: note

   No conclusions are drawn about the b19 case. The calling session
   is responsible for any case-level reasoning.