Last year, 6 months before finishing my contract with my old post-doc group, I came up with an extremely big idea. I took no holidays, and worked 18 hour days for months without taking off weekends to try to finish it in time before I left. I did this because some of my coworkers were blatantly bad actors, who have done adversarial behavior in the past.
[For example, a small project that I worked on with one coworker was done together, and then after experiment was complete and we took data, he recruited someone from another lab to come in for a few hours to "retake" data, wrote the paper without me, and put that person higher on the authorship ordering. (Which I protested and had fixed.)]
So I got the main results, and the project was essentially 95% done. I agreed to let my coworkers spend a few weeks to take a new set of data and finalize some figures. Instead they kept verbally agreeing to wrap things up and finish the manuscript. But months and months went by where they would claim that they just want to try this one thing and in 2 weeks they will wrap things up and finish.
Now it's been a year, and they've redone the measurements with a completely different experimental setup. They only managed to make some technical improvements to my origonal experiment. Finally, after something like 10 months, they force me in a meeting to discuss patent equity and authorship. I agree that they can add this new data to the existing manuscript. I also agree to share the first-authorship with one of the adversarial coworkers. And I reluctantly agreed to a 7-way equal split for the royalties of patent of my idea (which only one of the people really had a significant intellectual contribution, but strangly this one person advocated for the 7-way split).
So I think that things have at least finally been settled and done with. And now I recieve an email saying that the paper is being "rewritten" to be submitted to a different journal. For months I have been requesting comments or revisions to my draft of the manuscript, and instead they chose to simply start from scratch and write a different article. I have been linked an incomplete PDF where all the conceptual ideas motiviating the experiment have been removed, with just the results being stated (basically, we discovered an improvement in X and here are our results. Without any explanation for how we knew this, which was in my manuscript). This is a poorly-written, incomplete replacement that has removed almost everything that I have written from the manuscript. Additionally it has a blank section for "results" and "discussion." Implying that they would rather pass around a completely empty section than use what I had written.
My PI is a well-known professor (and has an extremely high administrative position at the university), and it's very important for my career that I can keep a good letter of recommendation from him. But my PI is virtually uninvolved. He is very busy with other administrative responsibilities, and has been well known for having an "in group" and will be adversarial towards those who are outside that group.
Having to spend almost an entire year just waiting for my old group to slowly try to steal the credit for my project has been one of the worst experiences of my life. The amount of anxiety and pain from this is difficult to even put into words, and I fantasize about somehow catching them in a lie strong enough to get them kicked out of academia, and for some justice to be brought to this universe.
Ultimately, though, I really just want this to be finished. And need to figure out how to be positioned in a way that prevents these bad actors from stealing any more than they already have.
Is there anything that can be done that can prevent them from "rewriting" this manuscript, and to revert back to the better version that I have written? Even assuming that they are not trying to kick me off being a first-author, the current draft is objectively inferior to what I have written, and I would not want it published.
At this stage, the only thing that I can think of doing is asking the PI to step in and that if the paper is rewritten that I will be forced to challenge it as a violation of academic ethics or have the situation reviewed externally. I hate to do this because I feel as though it probably burns a serious bridge.
Additionally, unfortunately, there is a second paper that is going to follow this that is in a similar situation, so burning this bridge will likely give them an even easier time to scoop that project as well.
Any ideas on how to proceed?
