Research-funding agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) still have no policies in place to prevent either ghostwriting or guestwriting, despite the importance of authorship in career advancement (Nature 468, 732; 2010).

Ghostwriting is the unacknowledged authoring of scientific papers by industry, and guestwriting includes authors who have made little contribution to the work: both affront academic principles.

Cases involving NIH-funded researchers might, the agency confusingly suggests, be regarded as plagiarism and so could be subject to federal regulations on research (http://go.nature.com/i5bnzo). The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's authorship policies also equate ghostwriting with plagiarism. However, neither ghost nor guest plagiarize anyone, and the putative 'victim' — the company — simply invites researchers to publish work under their own names (T. D. Anekwe Bioethics 24, 267–272; 2010).

The 2009 Danish law on scientific dishonesty regards misappropriation of authorship as research misconduct, defining it as 'false credit given to the author or authors, misrepresentation of title or workplace' (see http://go.nature.com/rj9slh and http://go.nature.com/kqzgsc).

The US Office for Research Integrity and others, such as the UK Research Integrity Office and the European Network of Research Integrity Offices, should follow the Danish example by introducing and enforcing regulatory policies on ghost- and guestwriting. Like fabrication and falsification, guest- and ghostwriting should be treated as research misconduct, not plagiarism.