How to submit paper if the student has graduated (and does not return emails)

Question

I was working with a student of mine on a paper, and we completed about %90+ of the work - implementation, experiments and paper writing. He had to graduate before his student visa was up, so after he defended I signed his thesis forms. I had asked him to share the latest version of the code and improve the paper to submit but he basically disappeared and does not answer my emails. I also noticed that he stopped sharing the earlier versions of the code (on Google Drive which I ran on Colab, it seems I did not save copies). He was a student I trusted and of good character so I never thought he would just disappear. Obviously, the way he behaves makes me skeptical, and I intend to repeat experiments and a new student agreed to take the work, even though it will be a great loss of time and effort to implement everything from scratch.

Moreover, it is basically this student's thesis work and I want to submit the paper with his name on it (first author) but I may need his approval or even a copyright declaration form to publish. How can I proceed in this case? How can I salvage the paper in a situation like this?

EDIT:

I am asking what people do in these situations, and how they salvage the work. I am not invalidating his contribution or authorship. This must be pretty common but it is the first time I am facing this.

I have projects where students work together, and our school mandates students to "publish" in order to graduate. Please note that this could potentially be very problematic for student co-authors as it could threaten their graduation.

Go easy with the assumptions, I had weekly meetings with the student to advise him, the idea was mine and I was very involved in paper writing and editing. I just did not do a good job with versioning/keeping copies of the code. I could potentially replicate everything but it does not technically make him less of a co-author as far as I am aware. Also, as the school requested upon graduation we signed a copyright form - legally we are both co-authors of his thesis work (which the paper is derived from).

Answer 1

Actually there isn't much you can do but keep trying to contact the student. You need their permission to publish and to include their name.

You can, however complete the work alone and only require their permission to publish the result as co-authors.

I wonder if it is possible that they aren't avoiding you, but aren't getting your messages. Perhaps the university has some alternate contact information for them. Or even another student.

Publishers will require permission from all authors. It isn't an option.

Even reimplementing everything isn't really a solution, if the student's ideas are still in the work. You can't escape that and avoid plagiarism. It is good to do, but you still need their permission to publish. Keep trying.

Answer 2

Although it is obviously advisable to get consent for your work from all authors, it seems that at this point one co-author is not responding, not co-operative to an extreme level, and as far as we know, theoretically at least "is not even alive". In cases where a co-author is deceased, it is still possible to publish a joint paper (this has been done. Edit: getting permission from their estate it seems). So in these cases at least, no real permission from all authors have been obtained.

My advice would be then:

• Send a clear message to the student that you are about to publish the work soon with his/her name as co-author.
• Wait a while (e.g., one month), and send another reminder.
• Wait another week, and send an urgent reminder about this to the student.

If the student does not want to publish, or has other plans and he is deliberately avoiding you, he/she will probably reply.

Otherwise, if the student does not reply, go ahead and submit the paper. Explaining that one author has disappeared in your cover letter to the editor-in-chief.

Comment: my assumption here and everywhere is that deliberately ignoring legitimate e-mails of colleagues is an ethical breach in any professional setting. If the student does not want to publish the paper they must let their co-authors know that.

Answer 3

Once shared, ideas are worth nothing. On their own, ideas can't be patented or protected. What matters is your ability to implement your own idea towards a recognised form of an output (paper, patent, etc). When you take more senior roles and no longer have time to implement ideas yourself, what matters is your ability to manage your team towards the development of your ideas in a supportive way while still ensuring the results.

In the described scenario, you have not involved yourself in development and testing of the code to the degree that you did not even have a copy of the code stored on your own device. I have to assume that you also do not have a documentation for the code beyond of what's described in the PhD thesis. If you have never tested the code yourself, how are you sure the results in the PhD are reliable and are actually produced by the code and are not simply faked?

You will likely want to reevaluate your approach to managing your academic team and the details of your supervision process based on this experience. Good luck.