Was promised coauthorship for 6 months, removed from paper 1 week before deadline after months of unpaid work. What are my options?
I've been working part-time as an unpaid volunteer contributor on a robotics research paper at a university in Boston since October 2025. The main author is a PhD student who I've known since undergrad, so I trusted him completely. At first he signaled that I would be a coauthor, and over time this became an explicit and repeated promise that he kept reaffirming until one week before the submission deadline.
Here is what I built over 6 months, entirely on my own laptop with no compensation:
• A full deployment framework on a real mobile manipulation robot including LiDAR navigation, SLAM mapping, custom keepout zones, camera integration, and autonomous object manipulation
• A simulation framework that another contributor is currently building on top of
• Multiple iterations of 3D designed and printed objects with ArUco tags for the manipulation experiments
• Full environment setup and optimization for navigation LiDAR
Three weeks before the deadline, the main author expanded the scope significantly — asking me to deploy a second robot, run his RL policy on the robot, and deploy a custom LLM agent for performance comparison. This was on top of everything I had already built. The main author himself admitted that not hitting the final milestone was his fault due to poor project management, not a failure of my work.
One week before the deadline he told me he was cutting the deployment and simulation section from the paper entirely, and therefore removing me as coauthor. He offered to put my name in the acknowledgements instead.
Here is why this matters so much to me: I am an international student on OPT with one year left in the US. I have been planning to apply for a NIW visa, which requires demonstrating significant contributions to my field. A coauthorship on a published paper would have been a concrete credential for that application. An acknowledgement carries no weight for NIW or robotics job applications. If he had told me at any point that coauthorship wasn't happening, I would have spent these 6 months on a different project or lab.
He is now promising to include me on his next paper in January, but I have no reason to trust that promise given he didn't keep the last one. He also wants me to continue working full time on the project over the summer.
The exclusion is purely an editorial decision about the paper's narrative, not a judgment on my contribution quality.
My questions:
Do I qualify for coauthorship based on these contributions, even if my section was cut from the final paper?
Is what happened here — being kept motivated with a coauthorship promise and then removed right before submission — an ethical violation in academic terms?
What are my options for resolving this before the paper submits in 6 days?
Any advice from people who have been in similar situations, or who understand academic authorship standards, would be really appreciated.