academia authorship
Future supervisor changes author order before submitting grant application
<p>In 2020, I started to work on a grant proposal for a 2-year postdoc. After 2 months, I was told by my prospective supervisor that the proposal was so good, that it could become a 3-year project and give a grant to a PhD student. I accepted, allowing my prospective supervisor to act as the principal investigator of the project. 3 days before submitting, without my consent, my prospective supervisor put his name as first-author of the proposal, in the version &quot;Final 3&quot;, but I wrote at least 75% of it.</p>
<p>And there are 4 letters attached to the proposal by external advisors that report my name first. Is this a case of plagiarism? Or has it a different name?</p>

<p>Plagiarism is not against the law; fraud, perjury and copyright infringement are. To determine whether anything illegal transpired, we would need much more information. However, we may be able to short-circuit the inquiry by asking whether the changes made are <em>required</em> in order to submit the grant proposal. As a general rule, the National Science Foundation (a major source of multi-year postdoctoral funding) distinguishes between a PI and &quot;other staff&quot;, and sponsoring universities generally require an affiliation with the university in order to be a PI. Hence a faculty member essentially serves as a conduit for a student's (or recent graduate) application for a grant.</p>
<p>There is no legal significance to the order of names in terms of copyright – that is not a copyright-protected characteristic. Order of names is not a true or false statement that is covered by perjury law, nor does it imply anything false from which a charge of fraud could be sustained (e.g. it does not imply that X wrote most or even <em>any</em> part of a proposal, and authorship of a proposal is not a material matter in inducing a granting agency to hand over money – rather, they rely on the logical properties of the proposal including the qualifications of those involved).</p>
