Background: Peer review is assumed to improve the quality of research reports as tools for scientific communication, yet strong evidence that this outcome is obtained consistently has been elusive. Failure to distinguish between aspects of discipline-specific content and aspects of the writing or use of language may account for some deficiencies in current peer review processes.

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I set out to describe the multifaceted role of author's editors in scientific‐technical‐medical (STM) information transfer. Help with manuscript preparation is only part of the picture; author's editors deal with many other formats for information transfer in addition to manuscripts that report original research. They may advise authors on publication ethics, peer review, and the publication process. They may work individually with authors, or as part of a writing and documentation team. They may act as the author's mentor and advocate when circumstances threaten authors' rights or dilute their responsibilities as communicators of science. Up to now author's editors have generally remained anonymous, but I conclude that recent developments in authorship policy may give more credit and public acknowledgement to the valuable part they play in the process of communicating scientific research. I also suggest that their close interaction with the producers, distributors, and consumers of STM information puts them in a prime position to contribute to research aimed at identifying and correcting deficiencies in current publication processes.

Research studies, especially in the sciences, may benefit from substantial non-author support without which they could not be completed or published. The term “contributorship” was coined in 1997 to recognize all contributions to a research study, but its implementation (mostly in biomedical reports) has been limited to the inclusion of an “Author Contributions” statement that omits other contributions. To standardize the reporting of contributions across disciplines, irrespective of whether a given contribution merits authorship or acknowledgment, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) was launched in 2014. Our assessment, however, shows that in practice, CRediT is a detailed authorship classification that risks denying appropriate credit for persons who contribute as non-authors. To illustrate the shortcomings in CRediT and suggest improvements, in this article we review key concepts of authorship and contributorship and examine the range of non-author contributions that may (or may not) be acknowledged. We then briefly describe different types of editorial support provided by (non-author) translators, authors’ editors and writers, and explain why it is not always acknowledged. Finally, we propose two new CRediT taxa and revisions to three existing taxa regarding both technical and editorial support, as a small but important step to make credit attribution more transparent, accurate and open.