How acceptable is it to publish an article without the author's knowledge?

Question

A few years after finishing my PhD, I was notified by my former supervisor that they had submitted without my knowledge a section of my PhD dissertation to a journal, listing me as first author and adding other team members as co-authors. They had litterally copied the section verbatim, without adjusting it to reduce the verbosity and to follow the outline a journal article usually has, even keeping in references to other paragraphs in the dissertation that didn't make sense anymore out of context. The paper was accepted shortly after.

Is it an acceptable practice to do so?

What could I have done to prevent the publication of this article at the time?

-- For context, I hadn't been in touch with my former lab in between the end of my PhD and this event, and the field is systems biology.

Answer 1

It is obviously not ok to publish the work of someone else without asking all authors. It is also certainly startling to see it done in such an apparently careless manner (as an unedited copy of a thesis chapter that doesn’t conform to the standards of the publication journal - and still somehow gets published). So what happened is puzzling.

Realistically, there is nothing you could have done to prevent it from happening. Given how strange this story is, you couldn’t have been expected to explicitly tell your adviser to please not do what they did. Maybe they meant well, maybe they did it to add a publication to their own record, but they shouldn’t have done this as they did.

What this means to you depends on details you don’t mention in your question (e.g., are you in industry or academia, did you plan to use your thesis work in other ways, are you worried about what you consider a sub-par publication).