Authorship in the 21st Century
My last post on humanities research seems to have generated some ripples, at least in a highly circumscribed readership. Issues raised (primarily on Facebook, it is worth nothing) can be grouped into four categories:
1. Open sharing in informal media (i.e. blogs, social networking sites) cannot replicate the level of quality assured by blind peer review.
2. Open sharing is generally not credited toward important academic milestones (first job, tenure review, etc.), and is a waste of time for young researchers. Also risks having ideas stolen and credited to others.
3. The existing forums for open sharing are inadequate, hard to use, or hard to find.
4. No-one uses the open internet anyway. Everything is moving back to the AOL model of access curated by large corporations (Facebook, Google, Apple in the English language world; Tencent, Baidu etc. in the Chinese-language world…)
I will respond briefly to each of these concerns, although I think that these controversies will remain largely philosophical until some broader shifts mature…
- Peer review kinda sucks.
Granted, some portion of reviewers (anecdotally about one in three) actually read the paper and give useful comments. But — again anecdotally — the majority of reviewers either don’t read the paper, or don’t understand it (sometimes admitting this in their comments). It’s not fun for the author to sort through a bunch of meaningless suggestions to find the meaty critiques. It’s not fun for the reviewers to read through a huge volume of mediocre papers to find the few gems. Generally poor wheat/chaff ratio (to add a third meaningless metaphor…).
More specifically, and supported by some level of research (major hat-tip to Scott for turning me onto Fernando Pereira):
Claims that peer reviewers are better as spotting intellectual theft or spoof papers are not necessarily supported by fact.
There are also questions about how much value copy-editing has.
Open peer review — where reviewers are asked to use their names — has attracted tentatively good responses.
2. The early career publish/perish paradigm also sucks.
One way of thinking about this is that young scholars need to keep a tight hold on their ideas to make sure they get credit for them. Another way of thinking about it is that they benefit from broadcasting widely so that they get noticed. To my mind, getting your ideas noticed is at least as big an issue as getting your ideas credited.
For better or worse, the existing paradigm make young scholars ride the coat-tails of older ones to get published. Often this means getting invited to contribute to special issues of journals or collected volumes. It also helps to have deep connections with the senior scholars sitting on the boards of journals and academic presses.
This is especially bad in the humanities because we almost never coauthor papers. So junior scholars cannot simply count on getting a second or third author credit by association with their main advisors — they have to publish under their own names. The barriers to entry are high.
There is therefore an argument to be made that early career researchers benefit more from open sharing.
Ultimately, early career scholars need to do both — publish openly, and suck it up and give Elsiveer rights to their most carefully crafted creations. At the moment, the two-front approach that I take — and I think others as well — is to post fragmentary materials or things that would not otherwise be published to the open web, and complete books and articles through the established platforms. I hope that the development of open publishing of overlooked formats will eventually wedge open other realms of publishing as well, especially if any level of credit is given for publishing dissertation reviews, scholarly translations, or any of the other growth areas of open publishing.
3. I pretty much agree with this one.
We are in the VHS-Betamax stage of open access, with no-one able to agree on a single paradigm. There are also widely differing attempts in various disciplines, from open peer reviewed journals in the biomedical sciences, to formats for publishing scholarly translation and commentary on sources, intended primarily for history of science, to Harvard’s more general DASH platform for open sharing. Not to speak of the issues of sharing on social media sites like Facebook that then come to own your content.
For what it’s worth, Harvard University (and a rouges gallery of other top universities) is on record in support of open access publishing (at least in a certain, somewhat circumscribed context), although I am somewhat dubious about posting to a Harvard’s own site that retains the right to make binding changes its terms of service without warning. I just wonder whether this is going to be a back-door for them to claim broader rights in the future.
I don’t think there is an easy solution. It’s going to be a matter of muddling through with the tools we have and eventually one or more will emerge as the preferred.
4. Um, Wikipedia!
There are serious flaws with the way the open web works, but it does attract plenty of users. And in any case, academics are never (or at least, not soon) going to be subject to the same pressures that have effected local news etc. We are the type of people who pursue difficult and obscure data, and publish it in archaic formats. So even if the open web becomes an anachronism to the masses, I expect that humanists will still use it.
And for better or worse, hackers are probably always going to be able to penetrate closed networks and share everything from classified government media to nude pictures of celebrities.
Although we may not admit it publicly, scraping password protected databases is one of the main ways that many DH scholars obtain their (our) datasets. I have recently learned (hat-tip: Paul), that the US does not accept the “sweat of the brow” doctrine: in the US out-of-copyright text is not rendered copyrighted by hard work, only by “creative” or “original” acts. That means that typeset or digitized editions of out-of-copyright works can be freely distributed, even if they were obtained through questionable means from repositories that restrict access (obtaining them may be another matter…).
Authorship
I think what this all comes down to is a sea change in the nature of authorship and attribution. In the humanities, we are accustomed to the idea that books and articles are the work of a single individual. No matter how much we thank colleagues in the acknowledgements, we claim the finished product as our own.
This suppresses a great deal of variety in the level of contributions. Thinking of my (only) published paper (behind a $40 paywall! — even I don’t think my 24 pages is worth the cost of two paper-back books): The work was 90% my own. But it could not have been accomplished without methods training and support from computer scientists, significant use of an classmate’s (un-cited, currently un-citable) annotated bibliography, and major adjustments based on an anonymous reviewer (again: not all worthless) — as well as less significant adjustments based on other scholars’ off-hand comments.
Despite my recognition of these people in the acknowledgments, the degrees and forms of their contributions are largely opaque. How much better would it be to incorporate their contributions to the authorship of the paper — through attributed comments, web links, etc. Once on the web, even this relatively minor — but critical — contributions would be transparent. And the people who gave extensive comments would be easily distinguishable from those who gave few or limited ones. Rather than preserving the myth of the individual scholar — and the finished work — this would render transparent the many, small contributions of people aside from the primary author. It would also do away with the notion that a work is ever entirely complete — or the artificial divide imposed by the publication deadline.
I think one of the reasons the sciences (and associated disciplines in the social sciences, and even history of science) have been quicker to adopt a variety of online- and open- publishing models is because they are more accustomed to the principles of multiple authorship. And also because there is a stronger recognition that science is always “in-progress” — that a published paper is simply one further contribution to an ever-changing body of knowledge.
Rich-get-richer commenting
A final issue needs thinking, and that is the nature of readership on the web. In all media formats, there is a rich-get-richer phenomenon — as works get better known, even more people view them, which feeds a positive cycle. But this is especially pronounced on the web, where the sheer volume of information, and the rate of turnover, means that there is a small window for something to get noticed and “go viral” before it is consigned to the trash-heap of yesterday’s news.
This has led to a variety of highly irritating — and arguably socially damaging — phenomena, including headline trolling. And ad hominem attacks in the comments sections.
If scholarship — and the critical process of peer review — is transformed into an open, community-based function, there is the hazard that only already popular scholars, venues and topics will attract sufficient attention to vet their claims. Anything already popular or newsworthy will potentially develop into a thriving community, while obscure and difficult topics and new scholars will fail to attract enough initial attention for their contributions to ever receive a larger audience. On the one extreme, there is the risk of politicization, trolling, etc. On the other, the risk of total obscurity.
There is no easy way out of this conundrum, other than to see what happens. I believe — which is perhaps another way of saying “I hope” — that the way scholars already network with like-minded (and similarly-interested) scholars will feed into this process of review and sharing. My minimal contributions thus far — three posts seen by an average of about thirty people and read by half that number — have already prompted two tentative panel proposals from scholars that I already knew, but would not have otherwise thought of as collaborators. We’ll see.
That’s all time permits me to say for now. Back to the diss.
