You can give away an idea and keep the credit

Most academics keep a list of questions they will never get to. A pattern in last year's clinic data. A study someone should run in their home district. A doubt about a method everyone in the field uses. The list grows faster than the time to work on it, and most of it dies there.

Giving those ideas away feels risky. Someone could take one and never say where it came from. A tool could rewrite it into something you did not mean. So the list stays private, and each question is lost twice: to you, and to the student who was looking for one.

The field loses too. The questions that get studied are the ones someone had time for. The interesting ones wait for a sabbatical that seldom comes.

The worry is reasonable, but it mixes up two kinds of credit, and only one of them is at risk. You cannot be scooped on a question you gave away on purpose. You can only be forgotten.

Credit for an idea is an acknowledgement, not a place on the author list

Authorship has rules. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors sets four criteria, and you need all four. You contribute substantially to the conception or design of the work, or to its data. You draft or critically revise it. You approve the final version. You agree to answer for all of it. Contributors who meet fewer "should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged" (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, 2026).

Your idea may well meet the first criterion. The same guidance says that everyone who does "should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting," and final approval. So authorship is open to you, but only if you do the rest of the work: help design the study, co-supervise it, or co-write the paper. If you give a question away and do nothing more, you will be thanked, not listed.

That is the honest price. In South Africa it is a real one, because subsidy and ratings count publications, not acknowledgements. Still, compare it with the alternative. An idea on your list earns you nothing at all, and most of the list will never be worked on.

What you keep is credit for the idea itself, and universities take that seriously. The Wits student plagiarism policy defines plagiarism as "the failure to acknowledge the ideas and writings of others" (University of the Witwatersrand, 2020, s. 2.1). It names whose ideas count: "students, academics, professionals, lay people", recorded in any form, "anywhere on the internet" (s. 2.2). It also covers failing to acknowledge them by accident. A student who builds a thesis on your idea is expected to say where it came from, under rules like these.

The contribution also has a standard name. CRediT, the contributor roles taxonomy published by the National Information Standards Organization, lists 14 roles. The first is Conceptualization: "Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims" (National Information Standards Organization, 2022). Journals mostly use these roles for their authors, but the word works in an acknowledgement too.

A public record gives you something to point to

A notebook cannot show anyone what you thought, or when. A public record can. You could hand the idea to one student you know, which works when you have the student. A journal such as Research Ideas and Outcomes publishes research ideas as peer-reviewed articles under your name, which takes weeks. Research Idea takes minutes.

The registry is a free site where people leave research ideas for others to take up. You write the idea in your own words, and rough is fine. An AI editor tidies the wording. A second AI, running on a different model, then checks that the tidied version keeps your meaning and adds nothing you did not say. If either check fails, nothing is published. You see the finished record and confirm it before it goes up. The idea gets a permanent page and a registry number, and the site records the date it was logged. When a student marks the idea as being researched, the page shows it. When the work is done, they can link the thesis or article back to it.

Your name does not appear on the page. It shows a contributor code instead, and only the site's records tie that code to you. That protects you while the idea is young. When you want the credit seen, you make the link yourself.

Three things to do this week:

1. Log one idea from your list, in the words you would use with a colleague over coffee.
2. Put its page where people already look for you: your staff profile, your CV or your ORCID record, under a line such as "Research questions I have left open for others". This is what joins the code to your name.
3. Decide what you want if someone takes it up: an acknowledgement, a conversation, or a seat on the team. Look at the idea's page now and then. If someone has marked it, your idea is moving.

The questions on your list are worth more in someone's thesis than in your notebook. Giving one away costs you a place on the author list, unless you choose to earn it. It does not cost you the credit. An idea in your notebook can be forgotten. An idea with a dated record and your name on it is much harder to lose.

Plagiarism policies differ between universities, so check your own. The authorship criteria come from medical journals, and norms differ between fields.

References

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (2026). Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/

National Information Standards Organization. (2022). CRediT, contributor roles taxonomy (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022). https://www.niso.org/publications/z39104-2022-credit

University of the Witwatersrand. (2020). Student plagiarism policy. https://www.wits.ac.za/media/wits-university/library/documents/Student%20Plagiarism%20Policy%20Approved%202020-11-28%20(002).pdf