Who Owns Published Outputs? Supervisors or Supervisees

One of the key responsibilities of lecturers and other tutors in higher educational institutions is supervision of students during preparation of dissertation and thesis as parts of the requirements for the award of various degrees. In some schools, it is the duty of a coordinator in a department to assign students to lecturers, who will coach and engage the assigned students for a certain number of months towards the production of quality output in the areas chosen by the students and aligns with the supervisor’s areas of specialisation or interest.

Typically, this process represents an advanced learning curve for the students because they have access to their lecturers within the direct knowledge transfer framework, which has been described as one of the best approaches for equipping what were taught in the classroom. For the students who participated fully in the learning process, there are chances that they would fix into the academia environment more than those who paid lip services to the expected rigor in dissertation and thesis production.

Apart from the fact that the lecturers are taking supervisory roles and students are the receivers of the constructive intellectual provision of the lecturers in the area chosen, lecturers are also collaborators in the production process. One of the existing submissions in this regard is that “collaboration can be a hierarchical relationship, like the one between a professor and a doctoral student, or a mutual relationship between two or more colleagues of equal status.”

The main product of the engagement for the students is the submission of dissertations and theses to their departments or postgraduate schools through departments. However, publishing journal articles and chapters in books are secondary outputs. Executing these depends on the supervisors’ interest in the main outputs. In most cases, supervisors do encourage their supervisees to modify the main outputs and present a journal article or a chapter in a book manuscript. In our experience, such manuscript gets refined by the supervisors when it is obvious that the manuscript may not be accepted by the editors of journals and books of interest.

Refining the manuscript for publication is not a bad idea as it signifies what our analyst called ‘redeploying learning research supervision curve’. A curve that helps students to further engage in another process for development of new academic products. What is really surprising in the second engagement is the removal of students’ names in publications by most supervisors. In our experience, this practice is not only pronounced in Africa, it is also in existence in other continents, most importantly in Asia, Latin America and others in the global south.

As the trend continues, there are different schools of thought regarding who owns the published outputs. As long as the supervisors refined the students’ works by removing the literature section and reworked the methodology part to align with the nature of the data collected by the students, supervisors own the outputs. The first school’s views. The second school believes that as long as the students are the basis of supervising. They are the ones who went to the field, spending their time and money for data collection, publishing without including their names is unethical and represents one of the key academic dishonesties to the fellow collaborators [in this case, the students]. What is your thought? Do you subscribe to any of these schools? Why? Let us discuss in the comment section.