The Incoherent Ponderer just submitted a paper to Science, and got an e-mail notifying him that he was listed as a co-author and asking him to do something if he did not accept this.
I had the same thing earlier this year, was a second author and immediately after submission got a verification e-mail from Science like that. It is not something I had encountered before, as recently as last year.
Interestingly, NASA's NSPIRES now also does this - it sends you a warning e-mail if someone listed you as a co-I on a proposal and gives you electronic access. Also something I don't recall from before.
I.P. ponders if the Science policy is from the stem cell incident, or some other recent case, or something we haven't heard about.
I also wonder, and wonder how it got made policy at NASA for proposals (which is actually convenient, because it is possible to agree to be a co-I or collaborator and then forget until very late in the game, which may make paperwork processing tricky - good to be reminded when the proposal is initiated).
Some interesting stories here.
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Does Science send to the e-mail address listed in the submitted manuscript, or do they actually look up your e-mail address independently?
After my wife moved to the USA, but before she became a Physics professor, she googled herself. Actually, this was long enough ago that she may have altavistad herself.
A paper title popped into view, listing her as a coauthor. She did not remember any such paper, although she recognized most or all of the other coauthors.
Turns out that it was a bunch of her former postdocs (whom she'd supervised) and grad students who'd gotten nice experimental results from some apparatus (ion-sputtering to make ultra-pure thin-film gallium arsenide) which she'd designed and built for under S10,000 and spare parts, as the only Molecular Beam Epitaxy device in that continent (Australia) was only available to their university group an hour a month.
So they listed her as coauthor because the apparatus was so central to their work, and forgot to let her know.
That's a good example of the bright side of the issue.
For the dark side of the issue, I've had people (in the corporate world) literally take my name of a document that I'd gotten funded, researched, and written -- put their own name on in my place, won an award for it, and -- when I complained up the Chain of Command -- been banned from attending any conferences where the plagiarist was going to be presenting. My Director (who had 420 people reporting to him, and ran a department with $50,000,000 annual revenue) retired in disgust, rather than continue maneuvering for the position of Vice President of Engineering. The VP of Eng at the time of the plagiarist was a Marketing idiot who didn't see anything wrong with plagiarism, which he analogized to "rebranding."
He did this to several other people -- all Caltech and MIT grads by the way -- and later investigation established that his management knew and approved. Those pesky Caltech and MIT people left, explaining why in their exit interviews.
It's like when the Nazis chased all the top Jewish physicists away, and the second-raters all moved up a rung on the ladder, which made room for the third-raters to also move up a notch.
Names omitted to protect the innocent -- and the guilty. So, yes, there is a good reason why Science does this.