Courtesy Authorships for Collaborative Grant Efforts

The discussion following one of PhysioProf’s posts on scientific authorship got long and discursive, bringing in a whole host of interesting issues. Many cover tired old ground, some are novel and fascinating and some seem tired and old but may have a little bit of life.
beets advanced a familiar complaint of trainees who, having worked their beets off to get on authorship lines see some senior investigator pal of their PI listed for no apparent work.

when I was in grad school my PI ordered me to list 3 other professors as co authors on all my papers, even though those professors contributed zero to the papers (all they did was show up to meetings, sometimes…and then still not contribute anything useful)….the only thing these honorary authors did was share the grant that funded the work thereby providing my salary and other money and lab space.

In response, Professor in Training sighed:

Are we REALLY going to get into these arguments again? They have already been covered ad nauseum