Congratulations on this research and best wishes for a helpful and robust peer review experience! I offer the following feedback, which I hope you can consider:

1. Given the involvement of a patient author and the recommended reporting guidelines for patient involvement, would you be able to include the GRIPP2 Short Form in your manuscript? See EQUATOR Network/BMJ/Res Involvement and Engagement for GRIPP2. By sharing insights via this best practice reporting guideline we can all learn from each other. The table could be added in your existing Methods section in the Patient and Public Involvement paragraph.

2. To assist with meta-research on patient authorship and facilitate listing and searchability in PubMed via the 'Patient Author' affiliation tag, would Laurie Proulx be able to add 'Patient Author' to her existing affiliation? We are working with publishers now to help boost use of this affiliation tag as trying to identify patient-authored publications right now relies on hand searching. A quick, free, and easy alternative is possible via PubMed if the 'Patient Author' affiliation is used. Wide use of this tag would help answer the Table 7 question re, has your journal published a paper with a patient author? We are presenting research on the use of this tag at a US conference this year and would be happy to share our results with you.

3. It is a concern that almost 1 in 5 of the respondents were not sure whether their journal adhered to the ICMJE criteria for authorship (Table 7). It could be useful from a hypothesis-generating perspective to see if the answers from this cohort influenced the broader results.

4. While not peer reviewed, there is reported documentation from ICMJE about patient authorship in the grey literature from Peter Bates "anyone (including patients) who meet all the criteria for authorship should be provided the option / opportunity to be so. Our document says so, and you should point to that if others think patients who meet all 4 criteria should not be authors.

In short, we believe that our statements apply to patients just as they do to anyone involved in a study and its reporting.

Personal communication from the Secretary of the ICMJE, December 2018"<br> https://peterbates.org.uk/home/garden-shed/payment-for-authors/

1. We have partnered with patients to conduct and author the first systematic review on the benefits and risks of patient authorship. It has been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Research Involvement and Engagement. I thought this might be of interest to your team for this or future work you do in this area. https://researchinvolvement.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40900-020-00190-w

2. We have also partnered with patients to create a free and online plain language guide to help patients review the rights and responsibilities of authorship...before they commit to authorship. It is CC BY 4.0 so can be shared easily https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Plain_Language_Summary_of_Good_Publication_Practice_Guideline/11292047

3. Patient authorship is likely to increase as more patients lead robust research projects. One wonders who the 33 editors (who don't believe patients can be authors) would expect to author the resulting publications. If the researchers involved can't author publications, then could this lead unethical guest authorship?

4. Relevant to the advocacy from patients for authorship, we are working with WECAN to develop the first, online, co-created 'Publication Training Course for Patient Advocates'. This course will be released under a CC BY 4.0 license to facilitate free sharing and re-use. We would be happy to speak with you about the course.

Again, I hope these comments are useful and I look forward to seeing this preprint progress to a peer-reviewed publication.

Professor Karen L. Woolley Twitter: @KWProScribe