Situation
John Boudreaux has worked as a research assistant on Professor Kent Hermann’s project on crime rates in the United States. The project, funded by a major granting agency, has been designed to have answer a number of research questions on whether the “dark figure of crime” has been growing in the United States (as a result of increased political pressure to show a decrease in the crime rate) or has been declining (due to better methods of police investigation). This is complicated project which will take a number of years to compile the data and do analyses. Professor Hermann has a reputation of including graduate students in publication and of encouraging them to do dissertations from the project or related aspects. John has decided to do a dissertation out of this project and presents Professor Hermann with a prospectus. Professor Hermann realizes that the student is simply interested in testing the major ideas of the project. Professor Hermann discusses this as a problem with the student and asks for a revision which focuses in on some particular segment or which adds additional theoretical concerns (and perhaps additional data) to the proposed dissertation. John revises the proposal adding a important extension of the theoretical framework but continuing to concentrate primarily on the ideas laid out in the original grant proposal.
Questions
- What are the ethical problems here?
- What could Professor Hermann do to assist John in the development of this proposal? What measures should Professor Hermann take to insure his intellectual property if this is at stake?
Discussion
It is common practice for graduate students involved in a large project to “carve out” particular portions of it for dissertations, papers, etc. The central problem here is the overlap between the basic goals of the project and what John has proposed. The intellectual ideas in the proposal predate John’s involvement in the project are the property of Professor Hermann. Professor Hermann is under no obligation to allow John to do a dissertation which covers the same intellectual territory. In fact, this would not be in John’s best interest for two reasons: 1) The work, known to be part of Professor Hermann’s research agenda, would be credited to the Professor if it did not mark out unique intellectual contributions, and 2) this would likely result in later problems in ownership of data and publication rights if agreements are not clearly laid out.
Professor Hermann should work with John toward an understanding of boundaries of intellectual property, establishing a project that would push John to his own research agenda. It is not always easy to “draw the line” and clearly distinguish what is a significant contribution to a scholarly work that requires joint authorship vs. that which merely needs proper reference and/or acknowledgment. Even with this difficulty, it is imperative that institutions have specific policies governing authorship and intellectual property. Some fields of study, particularly in the physical sciences, list a number of authors (e.g., members of a lab with the lab director as first author) as standard protocol, regardless of the amount of work the individual authors contributed. This is not standard protocol in other scholarly fields. However, the norms of the situation be made explicit, not only in terms of written policy, but as well, between the two or more parties who are working together on a project. In this situation, Professor Hermann should have made clear to John what the standard practice was within the department regarding joint authorship when faculty and students work together– whether on a faculty’s research or the student’s doctoral research. Reaching mutually satisfactory agreements among the parties involved is very impor-tant. There may be some areas of negotiation, which is all the more reason to make these agreements explicit from the beginning. In this case (and some argue in all cases), a specific written agreement, rather than just the Department’s or Professor’s general policy, would be useful. In addition, Professor Hermann might notify and seek the counsel of the Chair and/or the Director of Graduate Studies on this issue.
