A cornerstone of any scientific investigation is attribution. OSDD ensures that all contributions made on OSDD are attributed to the concerned. Intellectual Property, in addition to its other roles, plays a role in attribution (of authorship, invention, etc). Therefore in an open source scientific environment of drug discovery for tropical diseases IP could have a limited role to ensure attribution. Therefore if individual researchers would like to patent their inventions for this purpose, they are welcome to do so, but will need to provide worldwide royalty free non exclusive license to OSDD to work further. OSDD will take forward such molecules in the drug discovery pipeline and make it available without IP encumbrances. Thus IP may play a limited role but within the premises of affordability and accessibility.

A micro-attribution system will be followed for all contributions. Based on the peer-review contributors would get rewards in form of credit points. Each activity or a defined problem will have a per-determined set of points or rewards associated to it.  All probable prospective activity would be given prior points in terms of weightage, for example, lead optimization would have higher weightage than protein expression. The points can be accrued over time for all the contributions to the project.

Since the inception of OSDD in September 2008, a large number of activities have been initiated with several results being produced and some of these have been already published. OSDD encourages the Principal Investigators (PI) to publish their results in peer reviewed publications. OSDD Consortium, in keeping with the spirit of collaboration, has further reiterated the following policy for authorship of various papers for further clarification. All projects of OSDD are required to follow this authorship policy.

• In the cases where data that is used in the paper or in the execution of the project, has been generated by the OSDD Community, the OSDD Consortia needs to be given authorship

• When the OSDD Consortium is given authorship, it should be before the Corresponding author(s).                                                                       For example, if P1, P2, P3,...Pn are the PIs of the OSDD Consortium; S1,S2, S3,...Sn are the student researchers participating in the project, then the following authorship pattern may be followed: S1,S2...P1,P2, OSDD Consortium, Corresponding PI(s).

• There may be projects where the Chief Mentor has actively contributed and merits authorship. In such cases, his express consent should be taken to include him as an author.

• If there are specific and significant contributions of individual students or Principal Investigators of the OSDD Community they need to be given authorship.

• As there are a large number of projects being pursued under OSDD, it is likely that there will be many publications. To avoid duplication and to ensure that the micro attribution system has been followed, the manuscript should be submitted to the OSDD portal prior to sending the publication.

• The Title, Abstract and Author List should be uploaded on the OSDD portal by the corresponding author before submission of the manuscript.

• All the projects have to acknowledge OSDD for grants and resources if any used.