Preventing theft of your intellectual property

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In another thread here, madbutnotmad told us about how his research work had been stolen by an employee of the university he was attending:

Yep. Intellectual property theft is a big problem at some universities and in some scholarly journals.

The only defense is to make sure you have proof of authorship before you show your work to anyone.

The old-fashioned way to prove authorship was to mail a postmarked sealed copy to yourself (and then keep it sealed until legally necessary to open it in court). This is still feasible if you live in a country where the Post Office still does postmarks.

A more modern way is to upload a copy of your document to some cloud service. [EDIT: It might be a good idea to upload to two or more cloud services, not just one. You never know when Google Docs, for example, might have a big disaster and lose a whole big bunch of data.] What's important here is that there be an unalterable record of the date on which you uploaded it.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of researchers these days are getting their stuff published in open access journals before submitting it to the more prestigious journals.


Problem was, you couldn't prove it. "Innocent until proven guilty" applies here. They aren't going to take action on just one person's say-so.


They might have been singing a different tune if you had proof, especially if you also had a lawyer.

I decided to post this here, instead of replying in the original thread, because this is a very important issue generally for grad students who are writing a thesis and/or who are required to get research published.