[derbOac]

This is getting off-topic, but I've given up making heads or tails of authorship.

I know senior authors who are last on a paper just because they're senior and realize they (1) didn't really contribute much at all (they might have just inserted themselves on a paper), and (2) invoke the old meaning of last author knowing that the meaning has changed, so they end up being "the senior author" who gets a lot of credit just because they're senior.

Even producing the data takes on new meaning in an age of open science where datasets are distributed freely. What's the difference between citing an original study paper to give credit to the study PIs, and having them as a last author? Should someone who generates a dataset be last author on every paper using that data?

Sigh. Academics is so broken.