Hi,

I'm on a 3-year funded PhD, just approaching the end of year 2. Unfortunately, due to financial pressures, I have had to take on a full-time job. My new boss (it's within the same University and School as I'm doing my PhD) said he'd support me to to write up my PhD on a part-time basis.

My supervisors, however, are extremely unhappy and essentially want me to withdraw completely. Within a week of me informing them of my intentions, they negotiated with the project funder to take on an employed researcher for the final year of the project to analyse my data (interviews and focus groups) and write up three publications (on which they've offered to put my name...)

They claim I won't have time with the responsibilities of my new job to complete my PhD. Objectively, to my mind, this isn't clear grounds for me to withdraw.

They want me to stay on until the end of January to complete a round of follow-up interviews, which completes my dataset - then hand it over.

I would like to know who actually owns my data? I produced the research proposal and ethics applications under which the data has been collected. I conducted all the interviews myself. The transcription of these recordings has been paid for from the project funds. Only I currently have access to my data and I am not about to share it...

The only thing I can find online about academic data ownership suggests that the copyright of the data belongs to me:

So am I correct in thinking that the data actually belongs to me?

Am I under any obligation to share the data with my supervisor?

Is the supervisor within their right to employ a research assistant to complete my study, which I designed, using my data?

Thanks!

Hi suburbanhippy. Sorry to hear of your troubles.

A couple of questions that might affect where the ownership lies. Firstly, did you agree with your supervisors that you were going to get a full time job before you did so? Secondly, does your funding body have restrictions on employment whilst being funded?

It sounds as though perhaps they consider your actions to be a termination of your studentship arrangement, and any data ownership rights you had under that. Legally I have no idea what is right in this scenario, but it sounds like you may have put yourself in a difficult situation by effectively 'moving on' before completion of the studentship.

It sounds as if your PhD was part of a larger funded project rather than a quota studentship? Is that right? If so, I'm afraid you may (or almost certainly) have signed away your rights to intellectual property in accepting the position. You need to check what your letter of appointment said and what your institution's intellectual property policy is. But in large funded projects, data very rarely belongs to the individuals doing the research, but rather to the institution employing the PI or to the funder.
In general though, if the project has to be completed within a certain time span, and your decision to take a full-time job means that this would not happen, I can't honestly say that your supervisors are being unreasonable here, particularly as they have correctly offered you authorship credit on the publications. Get advice (is there a research office or an intellectual property team at your university?), but my gut instinct is that you are in a weak position, and that you should not alienate people. Depending on whether the data belongs to the funder or the university, could you perhaps negotiate continuing with a similar project part-time that would use the data but in a different way?