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Our colleague has passed away in autumn. He was active till the last days of his life; respectively, several texts of his authorship remain unpublished. We would like to publish them; yet the problem is that some of them are far from being finished (in particular, some of the sections currently consist of titles only).

I would like to ask the following: would you recommend us to publish these texts in their current form? If we will add some sections eventually, would it be fine to add co-authors to the corresponding texts (if the new sections would be really significant)? Do you know of any examples of dealing with a similar problem?

P.S. As far as I know, most of the texts in question are "book-like". Thus we don't have to submit them to any journals. And we would like to "act ethically".

Mikhail Bondarko
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    see https://mathoverflow.net/q/425182/11260 – Carlo Beenakker Mar 13 '24 at 09:49
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    Whatever you do, be completely transparent with the reader about it. – Theo Johnson-Freyd Mar 13 '24 at 12:50
  • A first step is to determine who owns the copyright to the texts in question. If the rights passed to his heirs, then the wishes of the heirs need to be respected. They may, for example, not wish the texts to be published. – Timothy Chow Mar 14 '24 at 07:34
  • Yes, someone should ask the heirs (that is, his family). Yet this a simple matter; if (for some strange reason) they do not wish the texts to be published, we will just forget about this matter.:) – Mikhail Bondarko Mar 14 '24 at 11:12

1 Answers1

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I would recommend publishing such a book in a Part I + Part II format.

Part I would contain the works of your late colleague with minimal edits: remove what's obviously wrong, remove the sections that consist of titles only, add footnotes that fill small gaps, add footnotes that flag gaps in the arguments.

Part II would contain added material by other authors.

For comparison (though the situation is not at all similar), a book that was published in a Part I and Part II format is Topological Modular Forms (https://www.math.ucla.edu/~mikehill/Research/surv-douglas2-201.pdf), that I helped edit and write.
André Henriques
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    I think that works well if the colleague was someone who likes to work linearly, i.e. in the case where the first n chapters are more or less done and chapters (n+1)ff only exist as an outline. In case of someone who likes to work backwards by starting with the main theorems and then works backwards from them to the introductory materials, I fear this would be rather unreadable. – mlk Mar 13 '24 at 10:51
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    @mlk. In the situation that you describe, Part I could be the material from the other authors, and Part II could be the manuscript from the late colleague. – André Henriques Mar 13 '24 at 14:09