How to get a research paper published after the author has died? Sometimes, a mathematician dies suddenly, leaving behind very good mathematics that didn't make it through the publication pipeline. For example, it is possible they had a paper entirely ready to submit (maybe even already shared with their network, or on arxiv). Or they might even have submitted the paper and then died before the referee report came back (as referee reports seem to be taking longer and longer, this scenario is becoming increasingly likely, sadly). Rather than have important work hang around forever as unrefereed preprints, perhaps mathematical friends of the deceased would like to see their final work published. Assume that there is reason to believe the recently deceased actually wanted the work published (e.g., a preprint they shared with friends and discussed submitting).

What is the algorithm for getting the last paper of a recently deceased person published?

If the mathematician is a huge deal, someone might archive or publish their nachlass, as happened to Gauss. But that tends to happen more in other fields like philosophy, whereas I'm asking about submissions to normal math journals, where the paper would be reviewed by a professional mathematician and checked for correctness (and presumably someone, perhaps a student or co-author of the deceased, would make minor changes and corrections).
I know a few people have done this. For example, Georges Maltsiniotis has gotten a lot of Grothendieck's stuff published, including Pursuing Stacks. But I imagine some of this was contentious, and I imagine Maltsiniotis already gets too many emails about Grothendieck, so I figured I'd ask here instead of emailing him. A few examples of mathematicians who died suddenly in my field and left important mathematics behind are Bob Thomason, Jean-Louis Loday (I note that there are several preprints still on his webpage, and I believe his work with Vallette was finished after his death), Gaunce Lewis, Mark Steinberger, and Mark Mahowald (who, despite being 81 when he died, still had work in progress that was completed by his co-authors after his death) just to name a few.
I imagine someone has to get the rights to publish the paper. Do those normally pass to next of kin by default? What other steps are necessary that I'm not thinking of? Do people know of journals that have done this before?
Long term, I'd love to see a journal designed to publish papers of mathematicians who died before they could see their last works through the publication process. Depending on how much work was required to get the paper in shape, you can imagine partial credit going to a non-anonymous helper who corrected errors, rewrote proofs, added an introduction, etc. But I'm asking a simpler question now, about how to get it done in the current math publishing world. Because of the nature of the mathematical peer review process, I think this question is a better fit for MathOverflow than Academia.SE. A related but very different question was asked on MO last month.
 A: This is delicate. First, someone who mentioned a result to a famous mathematician, and received some feedback, might decide to add the famous mathematician as a coauthor after their death, without giving that person a chance to protest. It is hard for journals to distinguish such situations from genuine collaborations.
Second, an author might decide to keep a manuscript in their drawer because they are not quite sure it is right. If it is then published after their death, it can lead to further contradictions. I was told that a story like that is behind the paper
Pontrjagin, L.
Characteristic cycles.
C. R. (Doklady) Acad. Sci. URSS (N. S.) 47, (1945). 242–245.
The reviewer (Hassler Whitney) wrote in
https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/search/publdoc.html?r=1&pg1=MR&s1=13317&loc=fromrevtext
that ``Both theorems contradict a statement of the reviewer [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 26, 148–153 (1940), near the end of §4; MR0001338]. It is not easy to find who is wrong where.''
I was told (but have not verified this) that the mistake in Pontryagin's paper was due to reliance on a posthumously published paper by another mathematician. (Edit: As noted in the comments, this could not be E. Cartan.)
A: My student Daniel Singh sadly died in 2020, having left academia and never having published his thesis (which was completed in 2004).  At the request of his family, I uploaded the thesis to the arxiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06875).  I contacted the arxiv moderators about this, and their swift and efficient response suggests that this is not the first time that they have encountered this situation.  I sent them a letter signed by Daniel's brother granting me the relevant permissions, then uploaded the thesis using my own arxiv account; it is possible to do this but still have Daniel listed as the sole author.  Both for submitting another author's work, and for uploading PDF without LaTeX source, it is necessary to be granted permission in advance by the moderators.
A: There is a related point, although it is a bit more in line with the referenced related question, but it was too long for a comment:
Write your will! Do it right now, not just before you need it. Personally I fully expect to still be around for many more decades and I don't think my family will squabble much over what they will inherit. Still, I have some details written out for them, because right now I can think up the things that will need to be done in one afternoon, while piecing them together from my unsorted stacks of paperwork would take them weeks, if not longer.
So to get back to the question, as with any mathematician, unfinished papers will very likely be part of my legacy. So the will includes a provision for that, specifically to send the folder on my pc that normally includes all the current drafts and ideas to one of my more frequent co-authors, giving him the express permission to continue and publish whatever he deems salvageable, or to pass it on to someone better suited, as well to include any co-authors if warranted.
This may not avoid all the problems. But giving a written, broad permission should avoid any legal objections to publishing or questions about my intent, while at the same time, explicitly giving the task to someone I trust both mathematically and morally should hopefully reduce the chance of publication of mistakes or of misattributions.
Although it should be said that personally, I would rather risk having posthumous publications of questionable quality, than leaving potentially good results unpublished in order to shield my legacy.
A: The OP asks for a specific "step by step process to get a paper published by a deceased person who wrote the paper alone".
A statement on this was made a few years ago by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). This involved a case where the manuscript was submitted by the author, who passed away before it was accepted.

*

*The first step is to ascertain whether the author intended their work to be published in the present form. Ideally the author has had a chance to respond to referees, but one might make the case that submission to arXiv suffices.


*If this is ascertained, then one needs to obtain permission from the legal heirs of the deceased. Which documents are needed would depend on the journal, it should include at least a copyright license and for some journals also a statement of "no conflict of interest".
Point 2 should not pose an obstacle, point 1 is more problematic. Journals generally require a statement to the effect that "all authors must have read the paper and approve of it". It would be unusual for a journal to publish a manuscript posthumously if it was uncertain whether or not the author was ready for publication.
A: To state the obvious:

Don't.

The only way to know for sure that the author intended a paper for publication in a particular venue is if they submitted it there, or explicitly given you their blessing or "power of attorney". Even if it is the case, the paper must be camera-ready or accepted after (trivial) minor revisions; substantial edits are unthinkable. Many times I rewrote proofs by my co-authors in a way that felt more natural to me, but they hated it, or vice versa. Do you want to do that to a dead person? Not to mention the possibility of actually introducing errors.
We are in the age when publishing in a journal and dissemination have little to do with each other. Most of the reasons to formally publish a paper do not apply to a dead author:

*

*they don't care about promotions and grants;

*as argued above, the paper cannot be improved based on reports.

The only remaining reason is that the journal vouches for correctness. But in practice, referees often don't check proofs carefully, there are plenty of wrong papers published, and in the end of the day it is the reputation of the author that gives most credibility to the work, not formal publcation. Again, imagine there's a serious error in a posthumous paper, the referee lets it slip, and the paper is published. That would be very bad, huh?
Instead, you can do some of the following:

*

*with the permission of the heirs, archive the manuscripts and notes online "as is",

*write your own exposition, séminaire Bourbaki style,

*assign a student to write a master thesis.

This will solve the dissemination problem while avoiding the above pitfalls.
