This request for a statement dealt with a medical researcher’s rights to a research group’s findings after the researcher had been dismissed from the group. The GSP violation complaint dealt with issues associated with the authorship of work performed in the research group ten years earlier and intended for use in a PhD thesis.
The university’s preliminary inquiry found the allegation to be groundless. A full investigation also verified as groundless the claim that the researcher in question should have, on the basis of research group membership, been named as an inventor of an invention patented by the leaders of the research group. The team appointed by the university to investigate the GSP violation claim emphasised that researchers must immediately notify their employer if they have made an invention and that the requirements posed on a researcher for inclusion in a patented invention are more demanding that those applied to authorship of a scientific article.
The Advisory Board took the view that the implemented investigation had not revealed facts, which would have verified an occurrence of a GSP violation. The Advisory Board’s statement did, however, point out that good scientific practice requires a university to make written agreements of the rights of each individual member of a research group before the launch of a research project and the recruitment of employees for the group.
The Advisory Board’s statements do not take a stance on issues of patent.
In addition to this, the Advisory Board noted that the GSP investigation had not focused on an article published by the same research group during the course of the investigation that could have been the subject of a separate GSP investigation request.