Publish paper without consulting project guide?

I'll assume "guide" means "supervisor." Hence, your project supervisors are insisting that they be listed as co-authors on your SDN paper written under their supervision. Assuming that their supervision resulted to an intellectual contribution to the paper, I believe you have an obligation to list them as co-authors. On the other hand, if your supervisors provided no input / no guidance, then I think you can publish without listing them as co-authors. You could invite the department head to mediate, if there is a dispute over whether the supervisors contributed.


This is not an answer to the question. But as a researcher, I would definitely answer this in my way. I don't care about the downvotes and flagging here in academia.SE.

Dear Mr. Priyesh, I would advise against publishing in such a journal. Sorry, this comment has nothing to do with the question.

  • This is a scammy journal. They must be charging you some money for the publication. From their site, I got this:

Publication and Indexing Charges

Other Author USD 65

Indian Author INR 1500

Which definitely suggests that it is from India and is a pure business.

  • There are a lot of grammatical mistakes in the web page that adds to suspicion more.

  • The reviewer board is not eligible at all to be called so.

  • When they mention that it is Open Access, why would they want a copyright transfer policy from the authors? Is it not sufficient to just ask for a consent form?

  • If you have not paid the money till now, do withdraw your paper. Anyway, it is left to you.

  • Regarding author order, it does not matter to the journal. They just want your money.

Be careful!

And one more thing, you should anonymize the article images. These may not be necessary to disclose your co-authors' details as per reputation is concerned.(in line with one of the comment by user2768)


One thing you should really keep in mind, is who paid for the project. Many universities and research institutes have the policy that all data from research done at their facilities, is property of the institute and not the researcher itself. So if the research was done there, big chance the institute's policies require you to at least mention them. If not, you could face a lawsuit on infringement of intellectual property, despite the fact you did the actual research. You better check that thoroughly before publishing.

In case you have to mention the institute in some way, I would propose the supervisor to list them as co-authors in second-to-last and last position. Many universities follow that same practice: The first (second, third) author are the ones writing the actual paper. The last author is the professor supervising the lab. So unless they're very out of touch, they should be fine with being second to last and last author.