system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Former advisor is trying to publish my idea

This is going to be long, apologies in advance. I’m currently a postdoc in a leading group in my field (STEM), my PhD was in a smaller group at a public university in the US. I graduated 3.5 years ago. 

For the past 2+ years of my postdoc I’ve been working on a new idea which is a potentially major development in my field. Last summer another group published this same idea. Our method works better, but we’ve had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to restructure our paper to show off the advantages of our method. 

Last summer shortly after the competing paper was published I met up with my PhD advisor, who I’ve always gotten along well with. I told him about how I had gotten scooped, along with some of the details of my method. Later that fall he emailed me with some questions claiming that his group couldn’t get my method to work, which I responded to with enough information to get the process working. I gave him this information as a friend/collaborator with the assumption that it would help him get a head start on a follow up paper to mine. 

At the same time, I was also finishing a final paper from my PhD work, which my PhD advisor wanted published in support of a grant application. This paper is in a much more niche area—his group is effectively the only one working on this idea—so it was not important to me that it get published quickly. 

At the start of lockdown in March, PhD advisor emails me to ask if I could get this last paper submitted by his grant proposal due date in early June. At this point I was already stressed about getting scooped again on my postdoc project, but because maintaining a good relationship with him was important for the future (and because it seemed like the right thing to do for a friend), I finished the paper and submitted it at the end of May.

Meanwhile, he emails me at the end of April (after I’ve been working on this paper for him for a month and a half) to let me know one of his students is preparing a paper on the method I gave him, with effectively no variation from the details I gave him. I wasn’t thrilled about this, but told him that was fine as long as he held off publishing until mine was finished. He responded by asking if they could submit by September (in time for a postdoc fellowship deadline for the grad student writing the paper), which I said sounded reasonable. 

My postdoc advisor is aiming for a high impact journal with my paper, and over the course of the summer the scope of the paper grew, which slowed us down. In October PhD advisor emails me to tell me he is submitting next week. I respond by saying, effectively, that you said you wouldn’t scoop me, and that if I didn’t put my work on hold to finish a paper for you that I would have submitted by now.

After a rather heated zoom call, he emails me to say they will submit in a month, that I should not have disclosed a method that I was not prepared to publish, that I said September seemed like a reasonable timeline, and that it’s not his fault I’m slow to publish. He offered to include me as a coauthor on his paper, however I haven’t seen his results and have concerns about being an author on two strongly overlapping papers on a single topic. 

My view, shared by my current PI, is that his decision to write a paper on my method is a breach of trust. I gave him that information because he is a collaborator and a friend, and I wanted to help him keep abreast of what I think will be a paradigm shift in our field. He has spoken to a few people in his department who say he has done nothing wrong.

Thoughts?


Tl;dr: I told my former advisor details of my current work which he now wants to publish. In his view this is ok because I took too long; I think this is a breach of trust.

Edit: typo (changed he to I in 2nd to last paragraph)
gpt
This is between your current PI and your PhD supervisor. Your current PI has a financial investment in the work you're currently doing and working to publish, and it really does sound like your PhD supervisor is exploiting your trust of them to get a leg up on your current lab. Your current PI needs to play interference here and start setting some boundaries and consequences for your PhD supervisor if those boundaries are crossed.