Postdoctoral researcher X, in the field of natural sciences, was dissatisfied with the RCR procedures implemented at a certain university and requested a statement on it from TENK. Postdoctoral researcher X had a few years earlier worked as a researcher in an international, interdisciplinary project lead by professor Y, in the field of the humanities, and provided a contribution of research from his/her field to the project.
In the preliminary investigation regarding the case, the university rector decided that postdoctoral researcher X’s work as a developer of the method did not reach authorship in all the academic studies published based on the project. Consequently, to show postdoctoral researcher X’s contribution in an already published article, it would be enough that his/her name would be added to the acknowledgments. One justification was furthermore that postdoctoral researcher X had not participated in the writing process of the manuscripts of the articles.
TENK attested in its statement that a researcher’s position in a research project is not, in general terms, significant while assessing whether he/she should be noted as an author in the publication. The issue of authorship depends solely on what personal contribution the researcher has provided for the production of new information being introduced in the research. So-called author’s honour, the right to become recognised as an author as long as there is a sufficient amount of contribution to the research, cannot be relinquished in an employment contract or other agreement. Moreover, whether a researcher participated in the actual writing process of the manuscript has no meaning in this context regarding writership.
Even though the preliminary investigation conducted by the university declares professor Y and co-author Z to be guilty of disregard for responsible conduct of research, it does not sufficiently remove any allegation of other possible RCR violations nor process postdoctoral researcher X’s right to authorship thoroughly enough. Furthermore, the university should have also heard the foreign researchers who were working in the project because they are also bound by the Finnish RCR guidelines.
Under the same RCR process, postdoctoral researcher X put forth the allegation that professor Y may have exaggerated his/her achievements when applying for the post of professor in his/her list of publications by altering the order of authors to make it more beneficial for him/herself.
As its conclusion, TENK stated that to clarify authorship, the university must start up the official investigation under the RCR process on the matter. Furthermore, TENK proposed that the university start up a preliminary RCR investigation to clarify whether application documents (for a public post) under suspicion were appropriate.