Can I get in trouble if I submit my own paper as a sole author while employed as a research fellow? I am a research fellow at my current university. I have been working under a very difficult line manager and we could just not be on the same page. I would be asked to publish 1 paper a month, expected to work 25 hours a day to meet deadlines and run personal errands. Our every technical meeting would be him saying, "you are paid to publish, publish in high ranking journals" and any paper I would write would involve his name even though 100% of the every work was mine. But I accepted this as a given since he was my line manager and the funding was with him, I would add his name to my papers along with other names suggested by him, usually I would get 5 authors for my paper, whom I never met.

I have been working on a paper idea, which I believed to be good, but it was an idea for a conference, not a high ranking journal. I presented the idea to him and he told me not to chase it further as he needs journals not conferences. And even if does get accepted he would not pay for it.

So I have been working on it alone at home and on the weekends. It is now at a stage I am happy with and I am most probably going to publish it in a good conference.

I have given my notice for leaving, and given the above history I want to publish this as a sole author. After all, he would not be paying for it and he refused to be any part of it.

Ive discussed this with a colleague and he painted a very grim picture, he suggests that if I do go ahead with this, my line manager can even take me to court and state that he was working under me and on my funded project, he went ahead and published without me and basically stole project time and project ideas. And he suggested not to publish this paper and just abandon it.

Sorry for being so bitter, but I worked very hard on this paper and would like this to be published. Adding his name would also not benefit as he's not very happy with me leaving and he would not give consent to publish, this would make it more complicated.

Im new to such problems and wanted a more experienced approach on what to do.

Thank you
As @Richard Erickson said in a comment, the answer is specific to your university and your contract. Here's the steps I would take if I were in your shoes:

Firstly, read your employment contract. What you're looking for is any language about intellectual property and the results of research. In the comments you mention patents and profits from patents, but that's irrelevant here. If it is specific to patents then it doesn't apply to anything that's not a patent, such as a conference paper. Assuming your contract doesn't unambiguously say that the university owns the IP...

Secondly, go talk to your university legal department. Do not cast this as a dispute. Simply tell them that you were reading your employment contract and wanted clarification about what the university's policy around IP is. Inquire over email, or get them to send you an email confirming their position if you wish to talk in person. If they tell you that their position is that you own the IP to your work, then you're golden. If they tell you that their position is that you don't and you think that your contract doesn't support that claim...

Thirdly, consider hiring a lawyer. This can be expensive and can be a massive waste of time if you're wrong about your contract (lay people generally are, compared to lawyers). Deciding if this is a worthwhile step is a personal decision based on a lot of factors I don't know.



If your university owns the IP, you're likely stuck. Your manager is most likely the person who the university has selected to approve you publishing things, and that seems like a non-starter. If he has a boss who reads your work and is "really in charge" then it might be the boss, but whether you're likely to get anywhere going around your manager depends a lot on the social dynamic.

It's also possible that you can get him to disavow the IP, but I don't really know enough about the details of contracts to comment much on that.