Just because you work in a lab doesn’t mean you get to call the data you produce your own. Ask Constantin Heil.
In the mid-2010s, Heil was a PhD student at La Sapienza University in Rome, where he conducted studies with his mentor, Giuseppe Giannini. That research led to Heil’s dissertation, a paper titled “One size does not fit all: Cell type specific tailoring of culture conditions permits establishment of divergent stable lines from murine cerebellum.”
Heil — who is now working in Switzerland for a company called SOPHiA Genetics — used some of those data to publish a 2019 article, “Hedgehog pathway permissive conditions allow generation of immortal cell lines from granule cells derived from cancerous and non-cancerous cerebellum,” in a peer-reviewed journal, Open Biology, which belongs to the Royal Society.
Apparently the conditions were not so permissive. According to the retraction notice for the paper:
The publisher has retracted this article from Open Biology in agreement with the Editor-in-Chief because the author was not granted permission (implicit or explicit) to publish the data used to validate the study. The author of the article made use of data that he previously used as fulfilment of his PhD degree at The Department of Molecular Medicine of University La Sapienza Rome, where the work had been partially conducted and funded in 2011–2014, and submitted the paper without permission from his laboratory supervisor, Prof. Giuseppe Giannini. The Editor is satisfied that the veracity of the content and key conclusion of the article is unaffected. Following determination by the university’s Research Integrity Office, the article in question is being retracted.
The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Jonathon Pines, the editor-in-chief of Open Biology, told us that the retraction was in process before he took over the reins of the journal. However, he added:
Note that we have followed COPE guidelines in dealing with this paper.
Heil did not respond to our request for comment.
Giannini responded, but said he would comment only if we would show him our post in advance — a rather ironic condition which we had to decline for reasons of editorial independence.
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If the data and conclusions are valid, it’s not fabrication or falsification, and if the author did not use his mentor’s ideas, words, or results, it’s not plagiarism. On the other hand, if the paper did contain the supervisor’s ideas without acknowledgement, then it would be plagiarism. So what is the sin that justifies an editorial retraction in this case? Do supervisors or funders decide what can be published? If the work was not published, then who would benefit from this secret knowledge? Was the issue the commercial value of the intellectual property? This is an interesting case, especially because of the power imbalance.
It’s curious that the editor did not accept the validation data as part of a citation to Dr. Heil PhD thesis. Doctoral theses are typically considered published work, even if less rigorously than peer reviewed manuscripts. If the validation data was drawn from published work, why are the permissions a problem?
In many European countries PhD students are considered legally to be employees. It pays to read you employment contract. Almost always it states in the employment contract that you do not have the rights to your PhD data – they stay with the institution. To publish them you need the approval of your institution – that is to say your supervisor. It would appear in this case that the University were able to show the journal that the student didn’t have rights over the data.
In the case where they weren’t an employee, it pays to read the rules very carefully, as somewhere there is a catchall that the data does not belong to the student, but the university – this is also the case in many US universities.
Regarding not showing a pre-release copy of an article to someone it quoted (regarding underlying facts): AAAS Science did that in the 1990’s, with names and sources redacted. This courtesy did not threaten “editorial independence” since they’d publish what they want, regardless of the source’s opinion. The tradition was not universal, but was a professional check that promoted accuracy in reporting.
The editor-in-chief said they followed the COPE guidelines but didn’t say which. Presumably the one on retraction, which lists as a cause the lack of authorization for use of the data. But note the guideline says the editors should “consider” retracting, not should always retract. If one works for a company (and probably many research institutes), one must sign an agreement that the employer owns or at least controls the data. This should be an important consideration in whether or not “authorization” is required. Unless the university has an explicit or implicit policy on authorization, then the research supervisor’s complaint seems to have little substance. Another factor is who were the people that generated the data? Without an authorization policy the more substantive issue would be authorship, particularly if other researchers were involved in producing and/or interpreting the data. That may have been the true basis of the objection. If he had included his research supervisor as a coauthor I doubt there would have been a problem, and likely the supervisor contributed enough to justify inclusion.