I would like to ask you for an opinion on how to act in the following scenario.
A year ago, some colleague PhD of me has suggested an open problem to me. This problem was already published in his paper, which is on arXiv.
He suggested that problem to me and invited me to collaborate on it. However, he is not very hard-working and I personally suspect that he is just waiting for me to prove it. He is working in that way quite often.
I, somewhat blindly, agreed to work on it. However, I do not like the way he “collaborates” and I would like to work on that problem on my own since he is not helping at all and only waits till the problem is solved so he can write it as a result to his grant.
We are very far from being published. Actually, not much work was done yet. I want to work and solve this problem on my own.
How should I proceed?
- Simply ignore him (he didn’t speak about problem for months) and publish the results?
- Tell him about my opinion, quit, and publish the results?
- Proceed and publish the results with him as a co-author.
- Do something else.