Re: Politics and Authorship in Scientific Journals

On 6/14/99, Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> Many moons ago, we had a discussion on whether all of the people
> mentioned in the ridiculously long list of authors in some scientific
> articles are true authors as understood in the context of copyright.

I read and very much enjoyed the Salon article for its explanation of how persons become "authors" for the purposes of a scientific publication. I didn't have this poster's emotional reaction to the practice, however. I think the scientific practice serves to disprove the idea that it is only under the new digital publishing environment or in multi-media works that "authorship" as a concept is becoming ambiguous or unclear. Instead, here are examples that are well-rooted in print technology and yet defy some of our assumptions about authorship. Clearly in science the actual writing of the document is not the key intellectual activity, and the document reports on the work of many persons (yes, including mentors and powerful people that one mustn't offend). The result actually seems more democratic than, say, a movie's credits, because each contributor is given equal billing in the scientific world, where Hollywood puts each contributor in his or her place.

The latter is, however, easier for us in the information retrieval world to deal with because we can differentiate contributors by their roles and therefore give more precise retrieval. It may also aid the legal issues of responsibilities where these are spelled out more clearly -- one isn't likely to mistake a key grip for a producer, for example, when acting on a perceived copyright violation. What I find interesting about scientific publishing is that you are often unable to determine from the work who it was who actually put pen to paper (or laser ink to paper), which means to me that it isn't an important concept for that community.

Karen Coyle                    karen.coyle[_at_]ucop.edu
  University of California Digital Library
  http://www.kcoyle.net        510/987-0567
----------------------------------------------