Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2019 June 10

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June 10

Share a submitted paper with colleagues

Hi; I have submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal which is now currently under revision (no decision yet) - a potential employer would like to see the draft now as part of the recruitment process, however, I know of their own strong science department and am now slightly afraid of sending them the draft. What are your take on this - any way to protect my intellectual property prior to the publication? Thank you in advance! --5.151.0.126 (talk) 19:47, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

You have evidence/proof that the paper is your own and the journal's records can corroborate that if you'd ever need to make an intellectual property claim. Sending drafts of papers is common practice when applying for jobs, so I would not be too worried about it. EvergreenFir (talk) 20:36, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Trap street? Introduce a few small typographic errors in your literature citations, the DNA sequences of your constructs, whatever is relevant to your situation and seems most likely to be used in a plagiarized version. Scan the paper, calculate a checksum and post it to some dated online forum like Github, Usenet, Twitter, whatever. Or do something more professional to archive the version. If the paper gets published with the trapped information, you have them by the short-and-curlies. But my impression is you need contacts involving some kind of "fixer" along the lines of Michael Cohen's dealings if you intend to arrange to blackmail them in a way that is legal and professional, and that I don't know much about. Wnt (talk) 03:12, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

• First of all, check with your co-authors, university etc. that you are allowed to share the draft. (Most likely that is not a problem - information that you are about to publish is no longer confidential - but you do need to check beforehand.) A group email would do.

Look at recently-published articles of the journal you submitted to. If articles have a mention of the date of submission, you have a proof of priority if it comes to plagiarism accusations (you certainly do not want to go there, but si vis pacem para bellum - the mere existence of such documentation will deter unscrupulous parties). (Almost?) all Elsevier and SAGE journals publish such mentions (received, revised, accepted, published dates); I would expect all editors that are not staggeringly incompetent keep that information internally anyway.

There are horror stories about reviewers stalling the peer-review process while whipping their own PhDs/postdocs to reproduce the same results and publish in a concurrent journal (stealing the experimental methods if not the actual data and article), however that is probably not a real issue for you, since (1) it is extremely rare, (2) it relies on the reviewer stalling publication (which they have no reason to do if they are a uninterested third party), (3) you are at the revision stage, so they already lost a couple of months if they wanted to pull that maneuver, and (4) presumably they are not as specialized in your paper's topic than a reviewer would be.

A more significant risk than plagiarism is that they are pulling a scam to get a copy of your paper (free of charge and ahead of publication). I would say it is an acceptable risk to take - assuming a research-related position, a draft paper would unquestionably be useful to evaluate your candidacy, and the information you share is something that would go public anyway. If they start asking about confidential information during the interview (your laboratory's internal procedures, procurement chains, etc.) at the interview, that is a much bigger red flag. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 10:28, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Poor man's copyright doesn't seem to work in the USA. It does in other juridictions Gem fr (talk) 10:32, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Most journals allow (and sone require) pre-publication of your draft on something like arXiv. That would take care of precedence and allow you to share it with your potential employer. On the other hand (being in a comfortably secure position), I would seriously think if I want to work for an employer whom I distrust in such a basic matter. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

• Preprint server like DSpace or arXiv. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:46, 12 June 2019 (UTC)