Scooping and GeneMatcher A colleague has uploaded about a dozen candidate disease genes to GeneMatcher, described here and here and located here,  with excellent success. However last year and again recently he has encountered the case wherein a case was uploaded and a cohort formed, but a few months down the line one of the dropped out collaborators published an n=1 paper in a low tier journal, basically using GeneMatcher to check whether the disease link of the gene was legitimate, to assess the phenotypic range and see what test are worth doing.

Is there documented precedence of this behaviour (preferably citable)? If not,
does anyone have personal experience of this and what is the ratio of incidences over total submissions (I know that is hearsay, but it would be very helpful)?
And also has anyone successfully taken action (say getting user barred)?
I am having trouble finding anything that directly addresses the issue of failed collaborations leading to scooping, but here are some examples of similar behavior:

it is sort of implicit in the discussion here.

This question on academia SE is related but not exactly right.

There are some related stories here.

Here is an article about plagiarism among collaborators, which is quite similar.

I feel like a lot of the discourse around preprinting etc. is similar but again not quite there.


As for punishment, that sounds hard. Scooping is sort of built into science; fighting over precedence is a big deal and has been for a long time. My solution would be to get rid of current academic publication and have everyone's open digital lab notebooks streaming results to publication feeds in real time; that way there's no ambiguity. Preprints and micropublications are sort of a poor man's version of this.
This is not a very complete answer but there may be enough there to help.