Beyond the Drawbridge

I am a serious threat to society, with my “writing” and my “independent thinking”:

There are several issues that I have to stress and that we need to discuss:(…) Any paper that is written from my lab is done so after I decide it is ready and appropriate for submission. In this case, you wrote a draft without consulting with me first and without me giving you the “go-ahead” to start writing.

I wrote the draft in my spare time, after I left the lab, adapted from a thesis chapter, and I had mentioned several times over the past year that I would like to do that. I have also regularly expressed that I just like writing things down and that I am not after high-impact publications or whatever reason people might normally have to write things down. Nothing has been submitted anywhere. I do not plan to send this to peer review, and I explained about preprint servers and non-peer-reviewed archives of preliminary data and I still got comments like “not every work performed in the lab and described in a thesis does or should be published as a formal paper. This part of your work fall [sic] into that category, in my opinion.” and “the experiments would have to be repeated by someone else to exclude human errors”

Fine, I know that. I know my work sucks, but people – respectable, smart people with valid opinions and tenured jobs – have actually asked to see it and encouraged me to publish it somewhere, anywhere, peer-reviewed or not. And of course I know I’m not allowed to just submit things places without permission,  but I didn’t do that. The whole discussion about submitting is beyond the point, because nothing was submitted. I just wrote it down. No, not even – I took something that I  had already written, and renumbered figures and tables. In my spare time. Because I wanted to.

And that is not allowed.