How to be a co-author anonymously?

Question

I am from country A and am studying in country B. A researcher from country C would like to collaborate with me. However, my home country (country A) has poor (hostile) relations with the researcher's country (country C). I'm concerned that if I accept this collaboration offer, which will be done in country B, I may get into serious trouble when I return home (should officials in my home country realize what I've done).

I do not want to lose this offer, as it may result in a paper which would be helpful for my career. Is there a way that I could use a pseudonym on any paper but still be able to claim authorship in the future when applying for jobs?

Edit

I am a PhD student and I do not care if I don't get the credit of the possible paper when I get retired in coming decades! I just need it for my first post doc position. I hoped others who had similar situation would write about their experience. I am sure I am not the first person in country A who is in this situation.

I hoped that I might use a fake name but use my original ORCID ID, so that when needed I can expose the paper in my profile for a limited time. I also thought that a recommendation letter from the coauthors would be good too even if I choose not be a coauthor of the paper.

Answer 1

You are clearly in a tricky situation that the usual customs of academic publishing are ill-prepared to deal with. There definitely doesn't seem to be a standard, off-the-shelf solution to your problem like some kind of registry for anonymous authors. However, with a bit of creativity there might be a path forward. I suggest the following:

1. Agree to collaborate with the researcher from country C, but make clear to him/her that you would like your identity to be kept secret for an indefinite period. Make sure that the collaborator is okay with mentioning you as an anonymous coauthor not just in the paper you end up publishing but also in talks, presentations, posters etc. Make sure this is a person reliable enough to trust on such a serious matter, and keep in mind that as with any secret, there is always an unavoidable risk that the truth will come out and somehow make itself known to officials in your country.

2. If/when you write a paper on the project, have the collaborator submit it to a journal, asking the journal to list you as an anonymous coauthor, under a name such as "John Doe", with a note explaining that this author chooses to remain anonymous due to fear of political persecution. I cannot be sure, but this strikes me as a request that a reasonable journal is likely to agree to. The journal may ask to have your identity disclosed to them so that they can at least have it on record for legal reasons. It may be okay to reveal your identity to them (which could actually help later on in your career when you wish to get the credit for the work), but keep in mind that this again increases the risk that the secret will come out before you intended it to or will become known to the wrong people.

3. If/when you ever wish to claim credit for the work in connection with job applications or other career-related reasons, make sure you have a reliable promise from your collaborator to vouch that you are indeed the coauthor, as well as some supporting evidence like email records, files, notes, etc. E.g., you and the collaborator can plan to have him/her send a letter of recommendation explaining the situation if and when you need it. Or, you can have the collaborator publicly disclose your authorship, e.g. in a signed letter he/she will send to you that you can post on your website. If the journal knows your identity you can ask for similar confirmations of your authorship from the journal.

   Keep in mind that it may be good to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong, e.g., the collaborator dies or turns out to be unreliable, or is worried about political repercussions for him/herself in country C. Having supporting evidence as I mentioned above, and having a few other people you trust know about your authorship, will all make it easier for you to confirm your authorship if and when you want to. Of course, the more people know your secret, again the higher the risk that the truth will come out in an unintended way.

The thing to remember in this analysis is that there is no approach that is entirely without risk. Given that political persecution is no joking matter, you would be well-advised to give very serious thought to the risk you are taking versus the possible reward. I don't know which countries you're referring to in the question, but I can think of examples where if your actions became known you could easily be accused of espionage and thrown in jail for many years.

Answer 2

I would like to somewhat second David Mulder's idea to use cryptography to support your authorship claim in case it is ever needed. However, there is a simpler approach.

1. Use a pseudonym in the paper as your author name. As suggested before, it should be roughly unique (so John Doe is not a good name). For simplicity, have the pseudonym match your gender.

2. Add a footnote to the title page of the article stating something like the following:

   Due to a strained relationship between the authors' countries, the (first/second) author used a pseudonym. Should at some point the (first/second) author be able to disclose its identity to some individuals or the public, she/he will do so by providing an explanation document with the SHA256 checksum A4D3.....F1.

This approach has the advantage that it is compatible with the "archival" idea, and is minimally invasive to the standard way of handling things in journals. Obviously, the document will need to be prepared and stored safely before submitting the final version of the paper, and its contents should be presentable to the public and hiring committee members, i.e., to every person whom you may ever want to prove authorship of the article.

Answer 3

Publishing under a pseudonym and receiving credit later has been possible under rare circumstances. For example, William Sealy Gosset published under the name "Student" because of restrictions imposed by his employer, and his discovery of Student's t-test wasn't publicly credited to him until after his death. Dan Romik's excellent answer outlines a reasonable path to trying to accomplish this.

However, it's worth thinking about ways this could go wrong. If someone in my department had a pseudonymous coauthor, it would be fascinating news, and some of the grad students would surely jump at the challenge of figuring out who it might be (on the grounds that there must be something exciting going on). Maybe a friend or visitor? Maybe someone else who recently attended a workshop on this topic? The grad students would chat at length about possible candidates and reasons why they might have wanted to keep their identities secret.

Of course it's unlikely that they could prove it was you, and the discussion would probably never reach your government in any case. However, it's possible that your name would come up in these discussions as a candidate (and conceivable that these discussions would even appear in web searches for your name, although I think they would mostly be in person rather than on the web). If this would freak you out, then I'd be wary of publishing under a pseudonym, since it's noteworthy enough that it's pretty much guaranteed to attract speculation. However, it could be worth trying if unproven speculation wouldn't bother you.

Answer 4

Honestly, depending on just how sour the relationship between those two countries is it might not be a good idea to openly in your paper mention that the name of one of the authors was withheld due to political tensions and the like. The cool thing however is that modern cryptography provides a solution here that I think is pretty good:

1. Use a fake (realistic) name without any special meaning
2. Place in the article links to the homepages of all the authors, creating a special homepage for your pseudonym author.
   _{In some fields this is pretty common, in some less, but I think that most editors would be quite understanding if you explain the reasons... provided you don't work in a field where it's common to have lots and lots of co-authors.}
3. On 'your' homepage (the homepage of the pseudonym author) list only the one article and a public key from a public and private key pair

Now, if you ever apply for a job and you wish to prove that you were the author of the article all you need to do is tell them to follow the link in the article, download your public key and verify that you are capable of signing a message with the corresponding private key. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this sounds like magic to you, but here is a wikipedia page and if you Google around there are a lot of ways you could set this up (for example, a lot of sites explain how you can set up this kind of scheme for email). If you want you can go even one step further and use your public key to encrypt a message which you place on your site explaining your circumstances.

The nice thing about this entire set up is that:

• Anybody looking at the article will not be suspicious
• If you apply for a job you can simply state 'Articles published under the pseudonym X due to political tensions (can proof ownership if need be)'. You do not need to involve your co-authors or editor at this point (for example if they die) and there is virtually no way to forge this (especially if the homepage is hosted on a third party system with logged history).

Oh well, it's a bit unorthodox and slightly harder to set up initially, but I just thought I would add this solution as it's pretty robust.

Answer 5

If your common project is sufficiently large, you can agree in advance to split it into two publications. You submit paper #1 under your real name and your coauthor submit paper #2 under his real name. Each paper cites the other paper (I hope this is not a problem with the authorities in your country to cite an author from a hostile country). This way, each of you receives proper credit and even a citation.

If your papers become sufficiently important, it is likely that future researchers will cite both papers, so you won't lose anything in terms of citation ratings.

A disadvantage of this approach is that MAY be considered "salami publishing", defined as: "the situation that one study is split into several parts and submitted to two or more journals". This may be considered unethical. However, if your project is sufficiently substantial, it may be too long for a single paper anyway, so the splitting may be justified from an academic perspective. As an example, see these two papers by Gul and Stacchetti, which are on the same topic and were published in the same journal in two consecutive years. Each paper cites the other "companion paper".

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Just for fun, I would also use ideas from Livings' answer: "you could embed a secret that only you know, e.g. a hash of a secret text, a product of two big primes or similar. Extra points for embedding those in a way that no one recognizes"

Answer 6

I would keep it very very low key, don't inform the editor, don't put in a note about political prosecution. That just makes people dig for more information. Some reader is going to inform your authorities, there are not that many possible countries.

The editor is not your friend either, you don't want him to mention your case when he gives a talk about his interesting life, maybe even in your country.

Take the name of your cat, something that is slighltly unusual, that will increase yhe chance of people believing you later. If you decide to claim the article, put a note in you cv that it was published under a pseudonym, if people don't believe you, they won't hire you either. No one will ever ask you for a formal proof of authorship.

Keep all the drafts, and higher resolution images than used in the print version. Just for the fun of it, you could embed a secret that only you know, e.g. a hash of a secret text, a product of two big primes or similar. Extra points for embedding those in a way that no one recognizes.

And think whethe it is really worth the risk, most articles are probably not.

Edit: In many cases, editors have not kept the names of reviewers anonymous, also, it is common knowledge that interesting articles are often shared pre publication with competing groups. One of my friends had an editor steal her idea, delay the article, and then write a better version himself. Of course, most editors are honest, but you don't want to trust someone like El Naschie, former editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.

Answer 7

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3!

Step 1: Cryptography

Using the fundamentals of the RSA cryptosystem, you can find two sutible, very large prime numbers P & Q and multiply them together to get a resulting semi-prime number N. If the prime numbers are chosen correctly (software will do this for you), factoring this semiprime number N to determine P & Q will be computationally infeasible. The only feasible way to factor the semiprime N will be by saving the original two prime numbers P & Q used to produce the semiprime N. However it is trivially easy to check that N = P*Q if P & Q are given to you.

Step 2: Publishing

Publish anonymously as John Doe or a similar pseudonym and include the semiprime N you calculated earlier with the published paper. Keep the prime numbers P & Q used to create semiprime N secret! Store them in a password protected file, or write them down and put them in a trusted location such as a safe or with a friend outside Country A. How you safely store the prime numbers is up to you but you must have confidence that they will not be disclosed, either by betrayal of trust from a third party or from being coerced yourself, before you are ready to claim authorship.

Step 3: Profit

When you are finally ready to claim authorship either publicly to the whole world or privately to an individual on an post-doc selection committee you will do so by proving that you can factor the semiprime N included with the publication. You announce that:

I user43259, am in fact the author of Paper X. I remained anonymous in publication for fear of political reprisal. As proof of authorship I show that factorization of the semiprime N in Paper X is N = P*Q.

Answer 8

Without knowing which countries are involved and the research discipline, this is impossible to effectively answer. In some cases, such collaborations could run afoul of laws governing such things as export control of restricted technologies/dual-purpose technologies or international sanctions. It depends on the project on which you are working, the source of funding, the regulations about technology export in country B, as well as the laws governing technology export to countries A and C from B as well as relationships and laws between countries A and C. (Aside: If one of these countries is the USA, this is a non-trivial problem and a potential risk that deserves thorough investigation. Anonymous international research in an area of technology that even remotely connected to anything export controlled could easily trigger an investigation).

So, while some of the strategies suggested here for how to publish anonymously may work in theory, without knowing the countries involved and the area(s) of research, the advice given in some of the answers could carry penalties and risks as big (or bigger) than those you seek to avoid.

Having said all that: assuming there are no specific legal risks (and your only concern is reputation or political fallout from publishing your collaboration), you need to find out if the journals you intend to publish in will even allow anonymous authorship. Until you do that, strategies for how to protect your anonymity are moot.

Answer 9

If you are genuinely worried that the government of your country of citizenship will persecute you, your friends or your family for collaborating with a researcher from an "enemy" country then the only way to stay safe is to avoid that collaboration.

All of the answers that propose ways to maintain your anonymity require you to trust a number of complete strangers (your collaborator, journal editors, employers, etc.) with a secret and, if any of them reveal that secret, deliberately or accidentally, you believe you will be in serious trouble.

Even if none of these people reveals the secret, you're still at risk from any of following, which could occur if your government observes that you left the country to study differential widget theory and a paper about that has appeared authored by somebody from the enemy country C and somebody who's probably from your country because he's made a big song and dance about not wanting to be identified.

• They ask you about it when you next go to visit your family.

• They hack your computer and find lots of drafts and emails to and from your co-author.

• They hack your co-author's computer and find lots of emails to and from you.

If you think the risk of your government knowing you worked with this person is genuine, none of the solutions offered will keep you safe from that risk. The only safe option is to decline the collaboration. Whether or not you give the true reason for declining is up to you.

Answer 10

I'd like to expand on an earlier answer https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/56983/6026 by DCTLib.

When publishing the paper, do it under a unique name, but DO NOT include any explanations about persecution, especially if you fear that an early investigation might be launched to connect the dots.

Instead of thinking up of a good explanation to sha256, just do it to a final or near-final version of the paper, but with your full name and attribution fully present.

I would also suggest that you might want to do it to a text-only version of the paper, as opposed to a binary PDF, because, ultimately with binary files, it may eventually be possible to generate hash collisions if the attacker is allowed to change the content (since the attacker could then change one of the hidden parts of the binary file to engineer a collision), whereas with a text-only version of the file, with just one of the author's name being different (and with the requirement of having to link it to an existing identity of the perpetrator, potentially over more than one paper), generating a collision is simply nearly mathematically impossible, since there's only so much of the visible information that you could amend without notice (even if you do use a hash on a non-final version of the paper).

Subsequently, once you have the sha256 in question, use the procedure outlined at http://cr.yp.to/bib/documentid.html to incorporate the mention into the paper, effectively without arising any suspicion! (Well, at least it wouldn't arise any if your field is anywhere near mathematics and computer science!)

When I write a new paper, I create a new ``document ID'' for that paper, and list the ID inside the paper:

Date: 2004.04.02. Permanent ID of this document: …

Subsequently, when making references in your resume, provide an brief explanation of the situation, along with the original files used to generate the checksums in question.