The Iron Ring

The Times ran an article last week about a Chemistry professor at Columbia who has retracted several research papers (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/science/15chem.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). The work was primarily done by a woman who received her doctorate a year ago and she is now working somewhere else entirely. What is remarkable about the situation is that the woman who was first author on the papers did not know they were being retracted. In fact, in the Times article she maintained that the work is concrete and doubted the efforts of the lab to recreate them.

I wonder how it is a journal can permit the retraction of a paper without explicit consent from all authors. It would certainly require the approval of all authors for the paper to be printed in the first place. Further, whose career is exactly at risk here? The graduate student who performed the work is now a doctoral student in a different field, which would indicate that it is the PI who will suffer from the retractions. But if the work does turn out to be falsified in some way, was it the PI who stood in the lab and fabricated it?

As with other facets of the graduate student-advisor relationship, the question of ownership lives in a gray area. After some online probing I discovered a University in Canada, McMaster University, which has a very lengthy and protective code of ownership for its graduate students (http://www.mcmaster.ca/senate/academic/ownstwrk.htm). In particular, the code gives copyright privileges of a thesis to the student, but not necessarily the ideas contained within:

However, the University also recognizes that the ideas in the thesis will often arise from interaction with others. In some cases, this interaction will have been solely with the thesis supervisor; in other cases, a larger research team will have been involved. For this reason, it is understood that the copyright refers only to the written document of the thesis. The ideas themselves — including any advances in theory, data, patentable ideas, or commercial exploitation of the work — may or may not be the exclusive property of the student.

How do we separate our work from our ideas?

# posted by Sarah : 10:29 PM