The Human Brain Project is an extreme case. On the other hand, there are pretty hard limits to the sorts of projects that our standard model of a single full-t

The Human Brain Project is an extreme case. On the other hand, there are pretty hard limits to the sorts of projects that our standard model of a single full-time person[0] can do, even with some part-time collaborators (i.e., middle authors). This is especially true for projects that involve a combination of very different approaches: bioinformatics, HTS, in vivo validation, etc. I've noticed more and more papers with multiple (sometimes 5!) co-first authors, but that's a kludge around the fact that we can't figure out how to allocate credit to teams. [0] And, almost invariably, a trainee