Authorship under the microscope – insufficient contribution for joint authorship of paper

February 23, 2026
Books

The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) has ruled on a dispute about the authorship of an academic paper published in Nanotechnology in October 2017. [1] The claimant, who was not credited as a co-author, argued that she was a joint author of the paper through various contributions, such as sketching out the structure of the paper and providing hand-written notes on the manuscript.

Yet the IPEC found against the claimant, reiterating that: (a) expression of the author’s own intellectual creation must be shown for an authorship claim to succeed, and (b) contemporaneous documentary evidence is likely to be given more weight than witness evidence, especially where a dispute is heard many years after the fact.

Background

Professor Ardemis Boghossian, the claimant, is a chemical engineer and researcher. She was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The defendant was IOP Publishing Limited (IOP), the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics, which publishes the scientific journal Nanotechnology.

In April 2015, Dr Dejan Djokic, the Part 20 defendant, was hired by Professor Boghossian to assist with a research programme. Later that year, Dr Djokic prepared an advanced draft of an academic paper, which listed himself, Professor Boghossian and a summer intern, Mr Aranya Goswami, as authors.

Relations between Professor Boghossian and Dr Djokic subsequently broke down, and in January 2016 Dr Djokic indicated that he wished to publish a modified version of the draft paper. A dispute arose between Professor Boghossian and Dr Djokic, and a mediation process was facilitated by the ethics committee of EPFL. An agreement was reached on the publication of the academic papers, including the modified paper, but the terms of the agreement were disputed.

In the summer of 2017, Dr Djokic asked one of the mediation facilitators for permission to publish the modified paper, which was granted. The paper was revised by Dr Djokic, accepted for publication in September 2017 and published in print and online in October 2017 in Nanotechnology. The paper was credited to Dr Djokic and Mr Goswami. It was accepted that the draft paper and modified paper were reproduced in substantial part in Dr Djokic’s revised paper.

Claims

Copyright claim

Professor Boghossian brought a claim against IOP for infringement of her literary copyright in the draft paper as a joint author with Dr Djokic.

Part 20 claim

IOP also brought a claim of its own under Part 20 of the Civil Procedure Rules against Dr Djokic, claiming that it had relied on standard warranties given by Dr Djokic before publication. Dr Djokic denied that Professor Boghossian was a joint author of the draft paper, and he took the position that he was not in breach of the warranties given to IOP. Dr Djokic filed a defence to the Part 20 claim and a witness statement as a litigant in person, but he did not provide a skeleton argument or attend trial.

Professor Boghossian, who was not a party to the Part 20 claim, made an oral application asking the court to use its judicial discretion under CPR 39.3(1) to strike out Dr Djokic’s Part 20 defence and separately, whether or not it did so, to give no weight to Dr Djokic’s witness statement.

Her Honour Judge Melissa Clarke rejected the application. The judge noted that CPR 32.5(5) would apply in any event, which would allow IOP to rely on Dr Djokic’s witness statement as hearsay evidence, which it had made clear it intended to do. Yet HHJ Clarke ruled that it would not be justifiable or fair to strike out the Part 20 defence, thus potentially preventing IOP from also being able to rely on the related evidence of fact as hearsay evidence.

Submissions

The claim for copyright infringement was heard in the IPEC by HHJ Clarke over two days in April 2025.

The parties agreed that, in determining liability, there were two issues for the court to determine:

  1. Was Professor Boghossian a joint author of the draft paper?
  2. If so, by the terms of the agreement reached at the mediation, had Professor Boghossian consented to the publication of the Djokic paper?

IOP accepted that, if the court were to find in Professor Boghossian’s favour on the two questions, then it would have infringed that copyright, and it would seek a contribution and indemnity from Dr Djokic under the IOP agreement.

Joint authorship

On the issue of joint authorship, there was no dispute between the parties on the law. As the claimant, the burden of proof lay with Professor Boghossian to satisfy the court that she was a joint author of the draft paper on the balance of probabilities.

Joint authorship requires the existence of the four elements set out in section 10(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, namely: collaboration, authorship, contribution, and non-distinctness of contribution.

HHJ Clarke referred to the 11 principles for joint ownership set out by Floyd LJ in Kogan v Martin. [2] The second principle was noted as being particularly relevant in this case, that there will only be collaboration between the creators of a work where those people who “undertake jointly to create a work with a common design as to its general outline” also “share the labour of working it out”.

Professor Boghossian’s primary case was that she collaborated with Dr Djokic to create a common design, relying on the following points:

  1. Dr Djokic had been hired expressly to work on the scientific modelling for her research project;
  2. the data of the specific scientific research and the team’s work were captured in the draft paper; and
  3. Dr Djokic had accepted that Professor Boghossian provided feedback to him on the project, and he provided her with regular updates on his progress.

Yet, as per the second principle of Kogan v Martin, Professor Boghossian also had to prove that she had shared in the labour of working it out. To that end, Professor Boghossian did not rely on contemporaneous email evidence, but relied on the following assertions:

  1. she sketched out the structure of the paper, describing each section and the relevant literature to be cited;
  2. she made changes to the text via hard-copy print-outs of the draft paper; and
  3. she was named as a co-author on a poster for a conference in September 2015, which cited the draft paper.

In the alternative, Professor Boghossian claimed to be the author of a distinct part of the draft paper and therefore the Djokic paper. She failed to identify the distinct part and, admitting that the alternative case was a “weak fall-back”, did not press that aspect of the claim in closing arguments.

Consent to publication

Professor Boghossian argued that, at the mediation, she had intended to agree to Dr Djokic’s publication of a new paper of entirely his own research. That was to be published after she had published a paper of her own research. IOP’s case was that the parties had agreed that the draft paper did not include any input from Professor Boghossian, and that there was a specified period in which she could have priority to publish a scientific paper first, after which Dr Djokic could publish his paper.

Decision

Joint authorship

HHJ Clarke was not satisfied that Professor Boghossian was a joint author of the draft paper, for the following reasons:

  1. The structure of the draft paper that Professor Boghossian claimed to have sketched out was simple and followed the typical structure for this type of scientific paper. As such, it did not allow for the expression of Professor Boghossian’s own intellectual creation and so did not pass the Infopaq test. [3]
  2. There was no evidence to support the changes that Professor Boghossian claimed to have made in hard copy, and HHJ Clarke found that her oral evidence was “very often contradicted by contemporaneous documentary evidence”. In any event, changes that were only technical comments would not amount to an authorial contribution, and, as noted in Wright v BTC Core, [4] the room for creative expression in scientific papers is likely to be limited.
  3. HHJ Clarke accepted evidence that it is standard practice to list proposed co-authors in a draft paper, but co-authors would be removed if they did not provide input into the draft. In any event, the burden of proof was on Professor Boghossian to show that she was a joint author by reference to the established legal principles, and being named on the conference poster was irrelevant to those.

Accordingly, Professor Boghossian’s claim for copyright infringement was dismissed, as was IOP’s Part 20 claim against Dr Djokic.

Consent to publication

In case she were later found to be wrong about joint authorship, HHJ Clarke also considered whether Professor Boghossian had consented to publication of the Djokic paper. The judge considered what would have been plausible in light of the contemporaneous evidence and the parties’ understanding of the various technical models involved. Ultimately, HHJ Clarke found that an agreement had been reached during the mediation, under which Professor Boghossian had consented to the publication of the Djokic paper.

Professor Boghossian’s publication claim would therefore have failed even if she had shown that she was a joint author of the draft paper.

Comment

The IPEC’s decision serves as a useful reminder that certain types of academic publications, particularly of a scientific or technical nature, may leave little scope for authors to demonstrate that they have expressed their own intellectual creation, as per the Infopaq test. Moreover, given the IPEC’s emphasis on the principle in Kogan v Martin that there will only be collaboration where people undertake jointly to create the work with a common design as to its general outline and actually share the labour of working it out, authors and especially academic supervisors should be aware that they may not qualify as a joint author if they provide only general guidance and high-level structural contributions to a work.

This case also demonstrates the importance of being able to rely on contemporaneous documentary evidence as proof of authorship, especially where a significant amount of time has passed between the writing and publication of a work, as is often the case in academia. In this instance, the court was particularly critical of Professor Boghossian’s oral evidence, noting that the events in question had taken place almost ten years before the hearing and, as a result, she may well have “implanted memories of things that were said and done that were not”. Further, the claimant had no record of the manuscript amendments that she claimed to have made to the hard-copy drafts, nor could she provide any precise description as to what those amendments were. That evidential gap made it extremely difficult for her to persuade the court that she had in fact made authorial contributions.

Ned Gompertz, Associate, and Fay Montlake, Trainee Solicitor, Simkins LLP


Article written for Entertainment Law Review.

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