On 7/30/98, Hilary Cantwell <hilary[_at_]deakin.edu.au> wrote:
>
> I've come across the concept of "jumior" authorship, which seems to
> exist in the more scientific areas of research and writing.
>
> Person A does research, writes an article or thesis or book. Person
> B, usually more of an authority, might provide supervision and
> perhaps even funding - but might never put pen to paper.
>
> Then you see both Person A and Person B listed as authors on the
> published work - Person B usually taking second place - as "junior"
> author, as a credit for their involvement.
>
> It's interesting, because I've been involved in a situation where
> Person A decided he really hated Person B and refused to let Person
> B be acknowledged as "junior" author. Needless to say, there isn't
> a proper contract which sorts all this sort of thing out. And
> Person B didn't actually do any of the writing. So we've got the
> scientific community saying that this sort of thing goes on all the
> time, that it's standard practice - but it is a very dodgy practice,
> copyright-wise.
>
> Does this happen in the US as well??
This is a general practice in the scientific community, and occurs in the U.S. There have been occasional lawsuits over it, as the principal investigator is not necessarily an "author" for copright purposes, but neither is the work a work made for hire. However, the culture of Ph.D and postdoctoral work makes these types of suits relatively rare.
The more serious problem arises in the patent area, where the U.S. statute is fairly strict about criteria for inventorship, but foreign laboratories have the custom of giving supervisors honorary status as inventors. When filing U.S. applications based on foreign filings, we always had to quiz the listed "inventors," particularly Germans and Japanese, as to which of them had actually contributed to the invention.
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