&gt; I think we need to be careful about how we define creative contribution; there&#x27;s a line to be drawn somewhere in there between a creative contribution for the sake of the software (i.e., speeding up execution time by 4x for a simulation running on a cluster) versus a creative contribution that enables the research (i.e., a novel real-time optimization algorithm for electrostimulation). The latter certainly warrants authorship, but I don&#x27;t think the former does.<p>So a contribution is only a contribution if it contains an appropriate amount of NIH?<p>No programmer is going to going to want to work with academics, if they are forced to inject bogus novelty in order to get fair attribution for the real work.