A disagreement with coauthor/boss about funding

In case the ethics argument fails, here is another argument against pulling the paper. If you withdraw the paper for any reason, you run the risk that the resubmitted paper will be rejected. The refereeing process is partly a random process.

The worst case is it takes a year for the journal to decide to reject your paper, and science moves on and your paper is now out-of-date and will not be publishable anywhere reputable.

In addition, the editor and others involved will now associate you all with making errors. A good reputation is worth a lot in academia.

I agree with you that this is unethical. There may be some gray area around assigning paper credit to certain funding sources, but it pretty clearly exceeds that gray area to tweak an acceptance date without an independently valid reason merely to attach it to newer funding.

It seems especially foolish to do this when both the funder and journal are aware you'd like to do this and when you've been informed it's not allowed.

It would be like trying to cash a check addressed to you and another person, being rejected by the bank, then trying to white out their name and walk back into the bank with it. The first ask is clearly a potential honest mistake - you didn't know you can't do that. When you come back with a workaround, it's clear you're cheating the system (and in the scenario I describe you've made pretty good evidence for intentional fraud).

Your coauthor is asking you to commit academic misconduct bordering on fraud. It’s unethical and pathetic, would mislead the scientific community and funding agency, and would waste the journal’s resources without any justification. And now that you’ve posted the question apparently using your own name, your coauthor’s intentions are publicly stated, which makes the behavior very risky to both your reputations if carried out.

The only way to achieve what your coauthor is trying to do in an ethical way is if your coauthor gets approval from the funding agency to acknowledge it as a funding source despite the acceptance date being earlier than the date of the grant. This actually seems to me like a reasonable thing to ask for, considering the fact that articles typically still undergo minor revisions after being accepted, and that working on such revisions requires time and effort. So my suggestion is to make such a request — it may not work, but seems worth trying.