DESCRIPTION

Collective authorship practices allow the demonstrably communal nature of authorship to manifest as an open and collaborative process. Within this category - which broadly refers to the opening of the writing process to various forms of collaboration and input from different actors - we include several related variants, as detailed below.

Collaborative authorship has been defined as an agreed, cooperative activity where authors 'generally know one another and have agreed to a strategy for publication and division of labor' (Hoetzlein, 2012, 2). The distinct but related term collective authorship, on the other hand, is defined by the same critic as a form of shared authorship occurring between authors that are anonymous and unfamiliar to each other, with no previous decisions towards delineations of labour (Hoetzlein, 2012, 2). This latter definition bears comparison to Gebru's (2023) definition of communal scholarship, which is defined by four components: the 'large-scale nature of communal authorship' (numerosity), 'lack of expressed or implied legal relationship among the contributors to a creative output' (informality), the dynamic and sometimes spontaneous nature of the work (temporality), and the 'interjection' of one's own contribution to an overall work, but not necessarily 'a common goal or shared vision' amongst the group (Gebru, 2023, 345, 362, 363, 364-365). While more commonly practiced in STEM, Zwart's consortium authorship, also known as 'group authorship' or 'team authorship', 'attributes authorship credit to a collective of participants who are [identified, but] not as individual authors' (Zwart, 2025, 741). This practice may apply to certain large-scale digital humanities projects.

A number of other terms included in this practice category refer to concepts of collaboration that incorporate non-human agency. For example, Copim's Experimental Publishing Compendium, which sets out to be a reference and guide for practitioners in experimental bookmaking, describes collaborative writing more widely as 'collaborations between different human and machinic agencies' on an equal footing, not just 'extending [...] forms of individual authorship and credit to a larger group'. Similarly, Selby's (2025) proposed term relational authorship 'offers [...] a framework [...] that acknowledges the plurality of contributors, embraces the asymmetry of roles, and includes nonhuman participants in processes of design and production' (106). Selby asserts that authorship should now extend beyond the human, and beyond poststructuralist discourse, which destabilised the singular agency of the author within humanist models of authorship, to 'include computational and machinic contributors' in 'post-humanist authorship' (Selby, 2025, 106), echoing Adema's 2021 posthumanist critique of authorship.

Peters et al. (2019) consider collective academic writing as a form of peer production that is intertextual, greater than the sum of individual parts considered from an 'ecological perspective', and an '"experiment" that recasts the ideology of the author and shifts the governance of subjectivity' (Peters et al., 2019, 32), answering concerns around romantic idealisations of sole authorship that exclude inevitable social contributions. Forms of peer production include research collectives, in which all authors write and publish under a collective name, such as the Warwick Research Collective (WReC). WReC themselves consider researcher collectives to challenge 'class structure and divisions of labor that the university has historically been designed to uphold' and offer potential 'as a form of self-organized, nonhierarchical knowledge production' (WReC, 2020, 473, 465).

Scientific disciplines adopted collective authorship practices by necessity long prior to the humanities, due to their often-huge project teams across multiple institutions, with publications sometimes having author lists that run into the thousands (Zwart, 2025; Klausen, 2017). In the humanities, the emergence of digital humanities 'laboratories or "labs" [...] often organized around "projects" to emphasize [their] collaborative nature', introduced the need for humanities disciplines to recognise distributed authorship. Pearlman (2023) explains that distributed 'cognition postulates that the work of the mind is not a solitary act', but 'distributed across brains, bodies, and "material, symbolic, technological, and cultural artifacts and objects as well as other people"' and is therefore 'not the province of a lone genius, but is socially and technologically distributed among multiple agents' (Pearlman, 2023, 88).

The benefits of collaborative writing according to the Copim Compendium are the ability to 'facilitate dialogue and [...] incorporate different voices and multiple audiences'. Various online platforms have enabled new 'processual and collaborative forms of publishing and reviewing' (Adema, 2021, 93), including familiar platforms such as Google Docs, but also EtherPad, CodiMD/HedgeDoc, Cryptpad, as well as openly editable wiki-books. Creative Commons (CC-BY) licenses have also introduced new potential for the re-use and 'remixing' of openly licensed scholarship, such the Liquid and Living Books series by Open Humanities Press, which are 'published under the conditions of both open editing and free content', allowing anyone the permission and ability to 'annotate, tag, edit, add to, remix, reformat, reversion, reinvent and reuse' any book in the series (Open Humanities Press – Liquid and Living Books, n.d.).

A push to appropriately recognise and further encourage collaborative scholarship, and to equally recognise the inherently collaborative nature of knowledge creation overall, has been gaining momentum. For instance, in creative practice research, a great proportion of creative projects are inherently collaborative, and therefore contributed to by multiple individuals. Recognition of this in areas such as film (Sellors, 2007; Pearlman, 2023) and creative practice more generally (Hanfling, 2025), has become a substantial part of the pathway to research recognition in the creative arts. Indeed, scholarship in this area led to the creation of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) (Allen et al., 2014).

Not all those critical of sole authorship advocate for a complete disavowal of authorship overall. Ede and Lunford (2001) express concern for the abandonment of authorship occurring precisely at the point that oppressed groups, such as women and scholars of colour, were only beginning to claim 'author-ity' through publication, citing feminists and postcolonial scholars who assert 'the urgent need to recover the voices of those whose otherness denied them authority' (Ede & Lunsford, 2001, 355). Hanfling (2025) advises against replacing the romanticism of the sole author with that of the collective and uncritically engaging with concepts like 'collaboration' and 'community' in ways that in fact only perpetuate unequal power relations. This echoes Ede and Lunsford's call to 'socialise' the author as producer but not to install a regime of collaboration by default within the academy. Knöchelmann likewise cautions that '[c]ommunities dissolve if authors who are responsible for their own utterances disappear within a cloud of unidentifiable voices' (2023, 126).

But collaborative, communal, and collective authorship are important and necessary within the humanities and need to be encouraged. The Warwick Research Collective reminds us of 'the potential of collective work to address, or at least to call attention to, the transactional narcissism that a university system organized around the logics of individualized competition, individual branding, and intellectual property generates' (WReC, 2020, 483). Selby adds that 'authorship remains necessary, but not in the guise of singularity, originality, or interior genius' and 'needs to be reconsidered through a new framework that recognizes authorship as a social process' (Selby 2025, 108). Such perspectives highlight the need to recognise 'the benefits and potential of processual, iterative, and versioned scholarship' and 'also challenge the essentialist notions that underlie the perceived stability of scholarly works' (Adema, 2021, 219).

References

Adema, J. (2021) Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (Leonardo). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11297.001.0001

Allen, L. et al. (2014) 'Publishing: Credit where Credit is Due', Nature, 508(7496), 312–313. https://doi.org/10.1038/508312a

Apter, E. (2009) 'What is Yours, Ours and Mine: On the Limits of Ownership and the Creative Commons', Angelaki, 14(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250903006492

'Collaborative Writing' (2022) Experimental Publishing Compendium. Copim. https://compendium.copim.pub/practices/56

Ede, L. and Lunsford, A.A. (2001) 'Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship', PMLA, 116(2), 354–369

Gebru, A.K. (2023) 'Communal Authorship', University of Richmond Law Review, 58(2), 337–412

Hanfling, E. (2025) 'Valuing Collective Authorship in Practice as Research', Journal of Visual Art Practice, 24(1–2), 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2024.2443710

Hick, D.H. (2014) 'Authorship, Co Authorship, and Multiple Authorship', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(2), 147–156. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12075

Hoetzlein, R.C. (2012) 'Alternatives to Author-Centric Knowledge Organization', Scholarly and Research Communication, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2012v3n3a98

Klausen, S.H. (2017) 'No Cause for Epistemic Alarm: Radically Collaborative Science, Knowledge and Authorship', Social Epistemology, 6(3), 38–61.

Knöchelmann, M. (2023) 'Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities', Elements in Publishing and Book Culture [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009223089

Open Humanities Press – Liquid and Living Books (n.d.). https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/

Pearlman, K. (2023) 'Distributed Authorship: An et al. Proposal of Creative Practice, Cognition, and Feminist Film Histories', Feminist Media Histories, 9(2), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.87

Peters, M.A., Besley, T. and Arndt, S. (2019) 'Experimenting with Academic Subjectivity: Collective Writing, Peer Production and Collective Intelligence', Open Review of Educational Research, 6(1), 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2018.1557072

Selby, E. (2025) 'That Which Withers in the Age of Digital Production: Towards a New Model of Authorship', The February Journal, (05), 96–111. https://doi.org/10.60633/tfj.i05.107

Sellors, C.P. (2007) 'Collective Authorship in Film', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(3), 263–271.

Warwick Research Collective (2020) 'Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century', Modern Language Quarterly, 81(4), 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8637924

Zwart, H. et al. (2025) 'Consortium Authorship: Ethical Tensions in Emerging Authorship Practices in Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research', Journal of Academic Ethics, 23(3), 739–758. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09592-x