CRediT contribution statement: Pros and cons of including non-author contributors? [closed]

Question

An increasing number of journals require a CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy statement for, among other things, "Enabling visibility and recognition of the different contributions of researchers, particularly in multi-authored works – across all aspects of the research being reported (including data curation, statistical analysis, etc.)."

Here's an example provided by Elsevier:

Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Priya Singh: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Wang Wu: Visualization, Investigation. Jan Jansen: Supervision. Ajay Kumar: Software, Validation: Sun Qi: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

However, the ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on fulfilling all of 4 criteria (including 1) contributions to the conception/acquisition/analysis, and 2) critical contribution to the actual paper). Most journals (in my field, psychology) follow this recommendation regarding authorship. Based on these criteria, none of the "authors" above warrants authorship. Yet, they all contributed to the paper in critical, but different (even complementary) ways, and should be acknowledged meaningfully.

A common scenario is that students providing critical contributions and substantial time commitments don't end up coauthors because they do not fulfill all four criteria (e.g., Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, and Project administration, but not Writing of the paper, which could be written by another, graduate student perhaps). It feels weird to acknowledge the minor contribution of one author (e.g., minor part of analysis, minor contribution to writing of paper) but not the student who did all the legwork. Or even the student who ended up spending dozens of hours collecting a large proportion of the data (Investigation).

Given that the ICMJE recommendations are not expected to change anytime soon, I wonder whether the CRediT contribution statement could also be used as a convenient tool to formally acknowledge non-author contributors, since right now, their contributions are often buried in obscured, unstandardized (even meaningless) acknowledgments sections. This way, non-author contributors meta-data could eventually be picked up and indexed quantitatively on different platforms (ORCID?).

Question

What would be the pros and cons of using the CRediT contribution statement to acknowledge non-author contributors more formally and transparently? Could it coexist with the current coauthor system or can only one of the two survive? Should you do it even if journals don't expect it?

Answer 1

However, the ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on fulfilling all of 4 criteria (including 1) contributions to the conception/acquisition/analysis, and 2) critical contribution to the actual paper). Most journals (to my knowledge) follow this recommendation regarding authorship.

I do not think that most journals do follow the ICMJE recommendation regarding authorship, at least outside the medical field. To take the journal Nature as an example

Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it

To take another example away from the medical field, the American Physical Society say that

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution or interpretation of the research study. All those who have made significant contributions should be offered the opportunity to be listed as authors. Other individuals who have contributed to the study should be acknowledged, but not identified as authors. The sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Again this is much less stringent than the ICMJE guidelines.