If a person stops contributing to a project do they deserve authorship? I'm involved in a long collaborative software development project. The project required continuous effort because the goal is very ambitious and the project started from scratch.
However, some early collaborators contributed to the projects very little, one was an undergraduate who didn't have the skills to contribute significantly to the project and the other was a post-doc who caused more harm before ultimately leaving the group.
My question is do these early collaborators deserve authorship on any publication that may arise from this project? If no, at what point would someones contribution constitute authorship?
Here are some thoughts:
Pro: They did technically contribute to an early prototype, and I wouldn't want to be left out of a paper that I contributed to, but couldn't ultimately see the end of because of other circumstances.
Con: The project has substantially changed since they contributed to the point and it's debatable it's even the same project anymore, as practically all the software has changed. More importantly to me, it dilutes the effort of the authors who contributed significantly more, and this can be discouraging.
That's always an awkward situation. The bar to &quot;deserve&quot; authorship is generally considered to be pretty low: If you intellectually contributed to the project, you should be a co-author. At the same time, people generally have the expectations that all co-authors continue to contribute to the paper in some form or other till the end, for example through the writing and proof-reading process.
So if someone helped develop an algorithm or worked on produce the data for the paper, they probably should be a co-author. But it is not unheard of to write an email to them and say

As an author, there is also an expectation that you continue to work with us on writing the paper; I recognize that you have moved on in your career, and if you feel like you don't want to be on the paper because you don't have the time to work on it, that's ok with us as well.&quot;

That's an awkward email to write, but sometimes it's necessary to either get a person to contribute more, or remove themselves from the paper.