Is it appropriate to send out a manuscript under review to a professor?

Question

I have a MPhil and planning to start my PhD soon. I sumbitted a manuscript to a popular journal in the field. After two rounds of major revisions, the editor is requesting a minor revision now. I finished the revision and submitted. The revised manuscript is now "with editor".

At the same time, i am emailing an oversea Professor who is one of the big names in the field. I am trying to invite her to be my co-author of my second manuscript. She agreed to read. And she asked me to send her the one with editor. Is it appropriate to send her the manuscript which is "with editor"? She mentioned that one of her PhD students may want to read my manuscripts too.

In fact, i would like to collaborate with this professor and ask her to be my oversea PhD advisor. I am happy that she wants to read my works. But i am not sure if this is an appropriate action to send out a manuscript under review.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You still hold all rights to your work, so yes, it is fine to send it.

I'm assuming that you don't have concerns that your work will be stolen if you show it to someone else.

Even if you sign away your copyright to the paper, no one is ever likely to object to informal sharing with colleagues.

Answer 2

Is it appropriate to send her the manuscript which is "with editor"?

Yes, sharing manuscripts is a great way to collaborate and see the quality of the work you have done.

Just make sure you know more about her PhD student and what collaboration is possible with the PhD student as well. Sometimes the collaboration is with the PhD student who has more time to work with you compared to the professor. Being too focused on a professorial level supervision may result in you missing out on great collaboration and supervision opportunity. A PhD student may be more up-to-date and have more time to spend with you to develop your PhD.

It is worthwhile to look at the rules and regulation around external/overseas advisors at your institution before you consider it too deeply. How much time and paperwork is involved? What are the expectations? etc. Is worthwhile to contact the university that the professor is at to see how easy it is to do external supervision with her institution. Some places require external supervisors to do courses before they can do the supervision which is a lot of hassle and painful administrative timewasting.

Either way, it sounds like you at least have an external thesis examiner...

Answer 3

Yes, of course should you share your manuscript with all trusted and interested parties. In order to avoid the danger that your ideas are stolen, you may consider to publish the manuscript online. In several areas, some authors publish their submitted manuscripts online on, say, the arXiv (for math and physics), which most journals are happy with since it increases the citations and hence their impact.

This has the advantage that the your authorship of the ideas in the manuscript is clearly claimed: nobody can steal them and claim originality (not even the reviewers and editors – and since you're asking, yes that does happen) and sharing the manuscript is not necessary. The disadvantage is perhaps that you cannot completely withdraw a faulty version published in this way (there are several arXiv papers that failed to ever get accepted for publication with a journal).