publications - PI published my work after I graduated without informing me (and with a different first author)

When leaving with my PhD I left a sizable amount of unpublished work, most of which was 95% or better complete. After several attempts over the past 2 years to find out his plans for publishing I all but gave up. Then tonight a google notification told me they were adding a pub on google scholar. It was my work (that I had written a manuscript in 2012) with someone else as a first author. I'm on the paper but was never informed or reviewed a manuscript. Im concerned because I still have presumably 3 more papers pending that could turn out the same way.

I would like to see 3 things happen.

• Reordering of authorship or at least an unbiased remediation/explanation of the current.


• Access to the submission process (including establishing agreed upon authorship requirements) or at least advanced notice should some other work be published in the future.


• I would love (but most likely won’t get) acknowledgment/censure by the institution, as this is not the first time the PI has acted dishonestly in this regard, and likely not the last.

I am looking for advice on who to contact, and how to approach the situation such that my claim is heard.

To clarify a few points: In my field it is customary for the author who contributed most both experimentally and conceptually to be listed first, followed by other contributing authors in roughly descending order of involvement. Lastly the PI (the Principle Investigator who oversees the work, funds the lab, the major professor involved, ect) is listed.

This order is largely taken into account when assessing a researchers body of work, as it is not common for papers in the field to have a breakdown of contributions by author in the text like in some other related fields.

Also common in the field is the ownership of the scholarship by the institution. This work was written up and published in my thesis. Additionally I prepared and formatted, and made available to the PI a manuscript for journal publication. Unfortunately, I cannot publish without the PI's approval, and I thought he was unable to publish without my approval.