This issue of OASE takes a position in relation to the ways in which authorship in architectural practice is both claimed and addressed. It argues for the importance of authorship and explore a wider variety of its conceptions in architectural practice. It seeks to obtain a more nuanced and varied understanding of the characters and roles that authorship, understood as the ‘owning’ of a particular architectural practice, plays. It offers a theoretical and methodological framework to address alternative forms of authorship. It wants to investigate alternative, contested and hidden authorships so as to understand the responsibility of the creative act in different ways.