Supervisor using my dataset without my consent to submit papers with his other students During my PhD (field of machine learning) I've been working in collecting a very large dataset. The whole work took more or less 1 year. I had the idea, collected most of the data and wrote all the software for data collection and data annotation. I acknowledge I had help from other people setting up sensors and collecting data, but mostly technical work.
Recently I've found out that my supervisor is giving this dataset to his other students without my consent and even submitted 2 papers (even before the submission of my own paper, so I don't even get a citation).
In those other papers, they wrote my name in the acknowledgements. I didn't find it fair and I've claimed at least co-authorship from the other papers. But my supervisor claims that he purchased the equipment, and the funding came from his project, so he owns the dataset and he decides what to do with it.
I took 1 year doing everything, and other students spent 0 hours, and I just get an acknowledgement? I really didn't find it fair.
I'm trying to solve it internally with my supervisor, but it's not working. Since the papers were already submitted, I'm not sure I will be able to change authorship. I have many proofs that this dataset was mainly developed by me.
What's the best way to try to solve this problem? Report it to the department? Address it to the conference chairs (the papers are still under review)? Or just forget about it and finish my PhD without complain?
I don't see anything problematic here, unless the papers that your advisor wrote with the other students take credit for developing the dataset (which would be a clear ethical violation).
Many papers in computer science use one or several datasets developed by other authors, and it's not a standard practice that the dataset developers are invited to contribute as authors. In fact, doing so may lead to vastly inflated author lists for papers that use many datasets.