Exclusion of a coauthor from an already finished paper

Question

My coauthor wants to withdraw my writing contribution and exclude me as an author of the manuscript that was finished a year ago. For the time passed, the manuscript was submitted to a few journals (with my name in the author list) but got rejected after review. The criticisms raised were due to the errors in their part of the manuscript.

Weirdly, no reasons were provided to me in a wording: "I decided to withdraw your..."

Besides acknowledging that this situation is sick and dishonest, what can I specifically do to prevent my exclusion as a coauthor? Thus far, I have clearly informed my coauthor that I do not agree to be excluded and withdraw my written contribution.

Answer 1

I do not understand how you find yourself in this situation:

Weirdly, no reasons were provided to me in a wording: "I decided to withdraw your..."

The right answer of course is to write an email that says something like "Hi X, I don't agree with this step. Can you explain why you want to remove my name? I contributed to the paper, it was a collaboration, and I continue to think that we should publish it together."

In other words, the right solution is to communicate. When someone doesn't provide you with a reason for a decision, ask for that reason. The only person who can explain it to you is them; the people on this forum can surely not know.

Answer 2

Consider seeking an arbiter to resolve the authorship dispute

Another answer here deals with copyright, but there are broader rules in academia relating to proper attribution of work to its authors. If your colleague attempts to publish a stripped-down version of this paper without acknowledging you as a coauthor, that could potentially constitute a form of academic dishonesty, insofar as it misleads the reader as to the authorship of the work. You have informed your coauthor that you do not agree to be removed as an author from the research, so your coauthor is in a precarious and dangerous position if they take action to publish without you.

As a general rule, in the event of disputes about authorship, a reasonable approach is to speak to your university to see if they can assign an experienced academic as a mediator or arbiter to settle the authorship dispute. You should speak to your coauthor to see if they are happy to agree to appointment of such a person, to make a determination on what should occur. If you are part of the same university then you could ask for the ethics office to appoint someone, and if you are in different institutions then you could agree on someone that you both consider to be independent and experienced in research publication. If you can obtain an experienced independent academic in your field to act in this role then they will be familiar with rules/conventions for authorship and they will be able to give you a sensible determination of what the authorship/acknowledgement should be on any paper you produce on the subject, either together or independently. If you and your coauthor are at the same university then this could have the force of a determination from your employer; otherwise it would need to be done by agreement.

One "carrot" for this approach is that without an agreement or binding arbitration on the authorship, neither of you will be in a good position to publish anything coming out of the research without raising risks of misattribution. Your coauthor may be willing to agree to a mediator/arbitrator if this appears to be the only option to publish the relevant research. I recommend you speak to your coauthor to find out the reason for their preference to remove you, discuss possible options for moving forward, and consider using a mediator/arbitrator in the event that there is no agreement on authorship.

Answer 3

If this was happening before the first submission or even after the first rejection, I would say yes, this is unethical. But the paper has already been rejected from a few different journals: assuming that these were sensible choices of target journals (i.e. not ridiculously over-ambitious or simply out of scope), the paper very likely has some major problems and does need a major rework. Many authors would have abandoned the paper by this point, but your coauthor has decided instead to try to salvage their part and go it alone.

This is opinion based, but my opinion is that it rude of your colleague to have made this decision without consulting you, but not unethical at this point as long as they really can separate out and not use your contribution.

Answer 4

You jointly hold copyright with your co-author on the old paper (until you give it up). But the co-author can write a different paper than includes none of your contributions and they hold copyright on that, without affecting copyright on the original.

Likewise, you could write a new paper that includes none of the contributions of the other and you would hold copyright on that.

Whether either "new" paper is publishable is up to publishers.

The old paper is a bit dead until you agree on it, however. Neither of you alone holds the right to publish. If either of you tries to publish joint work alone, or even with both authors listed, the other can object to the publisher.

---

Caveat: Copyright law isn't completely universal, but most countries adhere to the Berne Convention in most (not all) ways.