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I’m a PhD student in Quebec, and my supervision just collapsed after four years. I had a PI who funded me, and a co-director who handled the computational side. For the first two years, things were good, but my co-director’s behaviour changed after I started a PI-approved collaboration with a colleague in the US. Since then, he became passive-aggressive, dismissed my code, reused parts of it in his own work, ignored emails, and delayed all manuscript feedback.

The breaking point: he insisted I redo my entire manuscript because he thought my data's standard deviation was too high. This standard deviation is normal for this type of data. I pushed back with peer-reviewed citations. My PI isn’t computational, so he sided with the co-director.

I asked to add an external expert to remove the unilateral veto on my work. Instead, both supervisors pulled out of my thesis direction entirely. They don’t want to be on my papers, and they cut my scholarship from 9 months to 3. I was told to publish two computational papers alone within the next two months if I want to deposit my thesis.

I’m terrified I won’t be able to publish in time. I can’t afford APCs, so I need free-to-publish journals, which are slow. My immigration status depends on finishing. What are realistic strategies to get two papers published within ~2 months?

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    Check if your university has an agreement with the journal that some affiliated researchers (including students) can publish for free. (I know that my university has such agreement with Springer.) Commented yesterday
  • Reading between the lines: are they accusing you of academic dishonesty? It sounds like they think you fabricated data. Commented 16 hours ago
  • Nope they never accused me of academic dishonesty, they have the raw simulation files and the raw timeseries measurements and the codes to replicate my measurements and plots. I'm only accused of not collaborating with my abusive co-director, he kept pushing for changes in my research that were not standard practice, they weren't published methodologies but the ones i based my research project on were well documented and accepted. The easiest way i found to understand the situation is that my co-director is old school and didn't stay up to date on MD in the GPCR field Commented 14 hours ago

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Several thoughts. Where I come from deadlines can be appealed for an extension. Although it may be a hardship OP may be able to finish if given a no-support extension. Again where I come from, termination of support requires one semester advance notice. Regular journals may waive page charges in case of hardship so regular journals may not be out of bounds. Getting an article accepted in 2 months is possible but not very likely.

OP should be having a meeting with a department head or dean.

Final thought- we are hearing only one side of the story and I suspect things are more complicated.

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    Fair point re. final thought although just to counterbalance, it's at least as likely a full picture would paint the PIs even worse. They'll have much more experience and power in situations like this for example (to state the obvious). It's not like the student could spike the PI's career in return (in fact benefit to said career has already been extracted by the sounds of it) Commented yesterday
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    I second benxyzzy's skepticism of the one-sidedness. I'm not saying the OP did, but students behave badly all the time — usually without knowing the culture well enough to realize it — but it is the advisors' responsibility to correct them and deal with the situation responsibly. Even if the OP were underperforming, late-stage abandoment is not an appropriate response. Unless OP is really misrepresenting the situation, I don't see any excuse whatsoever. Commented 19 hours ago
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    @benxyzzy It is rare, but advisors may encounter a student who has done something wrong and refuses to correct themselves, insisting that they are right and everyone else is wrong, perhaps believing that because they have spent a lot of time that what they did has intrinsic value despite mistakes. Since papers are rather important currency in academic work, it's a bit of a red flag that two people don't want to be on OP's papers: that's a pretty strong signal of "we cannot endorse this work and would rather count the time we put in as advisors as lost". Commented 18 hours ago
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    @Mike The part that I think this answer is hinting at is that we don't know what all the advisor's steps were before it came to this point. It does not seem like it was actually overnight, as OP even describes this as going on for some time. Commented 18 hours ago
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    @Mike: The cut seems to be a hard “you got to 2 month to publish, 3 months to be out.” I think it’s an obvious firing of the student, giving a token chance to remedy that is neither possible nor desired to work out by the PI. Very harsh, but a friend of mine was fired in his 5th year in a very similar timeframe (and of all things with a clerical error starting it all). So it does happen, whatever light that throws on faculty. Commented 17 hours ago

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