Hostage authorship and dirty hands: A reply to Tang

In a recent paper published in this journal, we discussed a phenomenon that we referred to as ‘hostage authorship’. By this we meant a practice where an undeserving person X is included as author on a research paper as the result of a hostage-like situation, where the researchers of the article cannot proceed with their work unless conditions raised by X are fulfilled, including providing an authorship position on the paper. We proposed that this sort of situation occasionally resembles the ‘problem of dirty hands’ discussed in political science and political philosophy, and that researchers may sometimes be required to ‘get their hands dirty’ by accepting the request of X. Bor Luen Tang has raised a number of critical remarks to our account. In this paper we address his criticism and defend our original account