An angry author and an upset mentor: A story of conflict of interest and stolen authorship

Narratives about scientists can be historically relevant and insightful to the scientific community. According to McMullen (1970), one of the two principal senses of “science” is a collection of propositions, i.e., theories, data, interpretations called S1. The other is a second body of information S2 that McMullen considers as the ensemble of the activities that affect the scientific outcome in any way.

Grounded by this assertion, I retell real life accounts of one of my best friends, Hilmar Duerbeck, which have been compiled into a eulogy, The Eagle and the Dove, A tribute to Hilmar Willi Duerbeck, in his memory. One may ask, in comparison to the stories of the famous scientists, why might stories of a scientist of the caliber of Hilmar Duerbeck be relevant? Astronomer Hilmar Duerbeck was one of the most exciting scientific personalities, and definitely not a run-of-the-mill scientist.

First, here is a bit of background on Hilmar. He was born on the 19th of June 1948. Hilmar Duerbeck studied physics at the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken, and astronomy at Bonn University. From 1975 to 1991, he was scientific assistant at Hoher List Observatory, and astronomy lecturer at the University of Münster, Germany. Hilmar was a very prolific writer, and a most active editor. He occupied various educational and research positions abroad (Chile, USA, Belgium, Australia), and was a member of several international organizations, in which he served in numerous panels and commissions. He was an expert on novae, novae remnants and supernovae, and on cataclysmic variables and flare stars.

Despite his easy-going attitude, Hilmar found himself in situations that were upsetting to him. The following is an excerpt of a section from the eulogy, which presents two situations that upset Hilmar quite a lot: conflict-of-interest and a complex authorship scenario in scientific publishing.

Conflict of interest

Hilmar – together with Bernhard Wolf (1935– 2012) – submitted a paper on Nova Cygni 1975 to a refereed journal. It took more than six months to get the paper accepted, thanks to a very slow and anonymous peer reviewing round. But Hilmar later discovered that a competing paper had been submitted to another journal, about two months before the acceptance date of his own work. Finding out the name of an anonymous peer reviewer can be notoriously difficult, except in this specific case because the unsigned referee report had been typed on paper that carried the watermark of the referee’s institute. Hilmar could only conclude that he and his coauthor had been the victim of undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of the referee.

Unfortunately, there was no standard way to handle such a situation at the time, and Hilmar, probably like many other researchers, had to let it go. Today, such a situation could be handled by formulating a complaint to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), a forum for editors and publishers of peer reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication ethics.

Authorship

In 2002, Hilmar had put a major effort in preparing for publication The Münster Red Sky Survey: Large Scale Structures in the Universe (Ungruhe et al. 2003), an edited and translated version of Renko Ungruhe’s (first author’s) Ph.D. thesis that had been submitted and examined at Münster University in 1998. While the research work had been completed under another researcher’s supervision, Hilmar had taken over as mentor for developing the thesis into a manuscript for journal publication. The most important point to mention here is that Hilmar – although he had very actively participated in the preparation of this paper – was very uneager to sign it as coauthor, because he did not feel he met authorship criteria. In the end, he – very reluctantly – followed my recommendation to co-sign that paper: all conditions for authorship on publications, as specified by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), were more than fulfilled.

But while preparing that specific manuscript to be published in 2003 in the Journal of Astronomical Data, he came across what he called “a disgusting thing”: one of the referees of Ungruhe’s Ph.D. thesis had meanwhile published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a paper that was to a very large extent based on the results of that very thesis; moreover, the paper had been published without Ungruhe’s knowledge or permission.

We thus have the very aberrant situation that a referee of a thesis becomes sole author of a paper that is derived from that very thesis, while at the same time Hilmar, who had contributed significantly to a paper, had always been very hesitant to appear as a coauthor.

The functions of supervisor and mentor are, ideally, combined in one person, and mentoring should also incorporate the transmission of ethical standards from senior to junior scientist. This is exactly what Hilmar did.

What are the lessons of this story? On the negative side, it shows the dark side of the peer review system (applicable to not only journal articles but also PhD manuscripts). On the positive side, the story proves that there still exist bona fide scientists with a great heart and a great dose of altruism, who help their students. At the same time, we learn that these students are happy to acknowledge the help received from their supervisors. But the lesson, above all, is that - just as for unjust judges - there is no place for wrongdoers to hide in the academic peer review system: the community is likely to learn about them, sooner or later.