"Isn't that taken care of by the first author/last author distinction?"
NO - see my previous emails today on this topic as well. Here is an
excerpt:
The publication opportunity I was referring to earlier was not for very
young inexperienced scientists with no degree (shortly out of high
school). First note that you said "primary author". What you mean is
"first author", but the more prestigious and career-important author
position is CORRESPONDING author. Through corresponding authorship, you
get contacted by colleagues about your work for collaborations, JOB
OFFERS, and even journal awards (I got screwed out of one because of
this). Of course faculty demand this for themselves, even if they
didn't earn any form of authorship, because they can filter
communications between readers and the other authors.
"Or are you talking about taking the student's idea outright?"
This happens a lot actually, and with a VERY high frequency to postdocs.
"people who do creative work as employees rarely keep the rights to
their work. Typically, the intellectual property belongs to their employer"
The EMPLOYER of students is the institution. I have no problem with IP
sharing if a student or any other employee of an institution uses the
institution's (eg: the people's) resources to invent something that does
or could make money. Often the IP portion going to the institution is
about 50% which I think is fair in most cases, unless the person only
works there part time or can somehow that the institution and/or its
staff some how did not contribute to the invention significantly or even
were counter-productive in the endeavor.
Thus, in your analogy - if a scientist working at a company invents
something or otherwise produces something (artwork for marketing, etc.)
in the course of their work there, it is typically company property and
in some cases an agreement of royalty sharing (probably rare). It does
NOT belong to their supervisor. Their supervisor is merely another
employee serving a different role - but is NOT necessarily involved in
the invention or credit/reward for it, nor should they be by default alone.
"Isn't it better to say that grad students are not employees?"
At BEST students are treated like employees in our broken Academia
system. They are often treated simply as pieces of equipment or
slaves. ie: "What you produce belongs to the professor, regardless of
any other detail or fact." Deplorable.
On 10/17/2012 1:29 PM, Jane Shevtsov wrote:
On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 6:40 AM, Aaron T. Dossey<bugoc...@gmail.com> wrote:
When we graduate, we have more or less the same credentials as everyone else
- a degree. There are many successful scientists without Ph.D.'s but many
more with Ph.D.'s who are unemployed.
Can you make a rough estimate of the relative frequencies of each.
Also, to emphasize how little we get out of
a Ph.D. (a lot is stolen from us), we don't get credit for our work or
publications because the professor always gets credit for everything we do
while in their lab as a student or postdoc (which is something I am fighting
on other fronts - I call it institutionalized intellectual property theft).
Isn't that taken care of by the first author/last author distinction?
A PI may get some undeserved credit, but that's different from the
student not getting credit. The paper is still cited as Student et al.
Or are you talking about taking the student's idea outright?
BTW, if you believe that grad students are employees to the point of
needing a union and thinking of their advisor as their boss, I would
point out that people who do creative work as employees rarely keep
the rights to their work. Typically, the intellectual property belongs
to their employer ("work done for hire"). Isn't it better to say that
grad students are not employees?
--
Aaron T. Dossey, Ph.D.
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Founder/Owner: All Things Bugs
Capitalizing on Low-Crawling Fruit from Insect-Based Innovation
http://allthingsbugs.com/about/people/
http://www.facebook.com/Allthingsbugs
1-352-281-3643
