Acknowledgement and Reference Policy

Policy on References and Acknowledgements

The BC Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre (GSC) monitors our contributions to the scientific community. This is done as part of our ongoing support for the activities of our collaborators, as well as to ensure we meet the requirements of both our funding partners and our charter as a non-profit agency. In order to achieve this, we require our collaborators to acknowledge the work performed by the GSC in any or all of the following ways:

1. The GSC does not request or require co-authorship on publications when data has been generated through their cost-recovery collaborative service alone, i.e. when no intellectual contribution has been made.

2. Where intellectual contributions have been made by the GSC, collaborators are required to discuss potential and pending publications based on these contributions with the relevant GSC scientists or staff to identify appropriate co-authorship.

3. At a minimum, acknowledgement of the work of the GSC should be included in peer-reviewed publications. The following sentence can be incorporated into the Acknowledgements section of the article: “The authors wish to acknowledge Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, Canada for [activity].  A full list of funders of infrastructure and research supporting the services accessed is available at www.bcgsc.ca/about/funding_support”.

4. In addition, acknowledgements should appear in the text of peer-reviewed publications, for example in the Materials and Methods sections. A suggested sentence for inclusion is: “[Activity] was performed by Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, Canada”.

We would be very pleased to receive notification when collaborators publish papers acknowledging the GSC.