Help me persuade a small philosopher's 'circle' to use the Philosopher's Research Network to distribute papers given at our annual meeting.

April 1, 2008 1:14 PM

Help me persuade a small philosopher's 'circle' to use the Philosopher's Research Network to distribute papers given at our annual meeting.

Objections include:
1. Young scholars cannot risk the loss of reputation associated with a flawed article appearing publicly. (Possible answer: papers are vetted by older scholars at the acceptance phase, the circle as a whole during their reading, and anyway, need not be posted until they are judged ready by the author and the circle.)
2. Online publication of drafts will decrease the likelihood of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
3. Online access promotes plagiarism.

Anyone who has used any part of the SSRN or other online draft repositories successfully, I'd appreciate your anecdotes and advice on swaying the group. I'm especially hoping for refutations of the above points, and anyone who can say that SSRN-like sites have helped their careers or scholarship.

posted by anotherpanacea to religion & philosophy (8 comments total)

some discussion of this issue at Leiter
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:29 PM on April 1, 2008

3. Online access promotes plagiarism.

This is absurd. It may be true that having more papers in electronic form lowers the technical hurdles involved in easily plagiarizing. (i) However, this is happening anyways -- in the form of ready access to journal articles in electronic form via your university's library. Trying to stop this by not using preprint archives is like only building half the dike. Not to mention initiatives like google books. (ii) Online/electronic access does nothing to change the motivations that underly plagiarism, which from everything I've read (there is a fair amount of information on the web on why students plagiarize, as well as a bunch of chronicle articles), have little to do with any facts about the sources they are plagiarizing from. That is, plagiarizing is an act that is extremely causally distant from someone putting a paper on a preprint archive. (iii) Better for them to be plagiarizing from a pre-print archive, which is typically google-indexed (I don't know about yours in particular), than other sources; this way is much easier to find out. The usual indicator for plagiarism is a quality/style of writing that is completely different from the rest of the paper or the student's work, and my first reaction (and most instructors I've worked with) is to google a little segment.
posted by advil at 2:24 PM on April 1, 2008

LM- Two things. For some of the circle, there's an automatic recoil at all things related to BL, since the topic is somewhat 'continental.' More to the point, that discussion is purely theoretical. It resolves the preprint/publication issue, but I think the biggest concern may be 'reputation.' To my mind, having work available for criticism and redrafting makes it stronger, not weaker. But not everyone agrees: they think they'll be caught misdeclining in Greek or somesuch and rendered unemployable.

Have you used PRN? Do you know anyone who has?
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:36 AM on April 2, 2008

advil- I think the concern is with professional plagiarism, not student attempts. That is, the ideas and arguments in a draft could find their way into an article for a more established scholar, and the junior scholar wouldn't have much recourse since most people in the profession would tend to credit the senior scholar.

I naively believe that this very rarely happens, but I also don't quite know what -I- would do if put in that situation. Just look at Rosalind Franklin.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:42 AM on April 2, 2008

I think having it up on SSRN is maybe like presenting it at a conference, which is to say, a peer reviewed journal isn't likely to think of it as already published at that point. You've been sharing it, getting your word out, that kind of thing. But people commonly present the same paper at multiple conferences before it gets printed in a good journal. I know people (continental types) who religiously check their downloads on SSRN to gauge how something's being received, and consider online links to their papers almost as big as conference acceptances.

Saving yourself for the one big moment when you publish in Nous or whatever is likely to be a letdown. You have to work with the people interested in hearing what you have to say, and expand that circle by sharing your work, not saving it up. I certainly understand the hesitation to put yourself out there, but I think SSRN is a pretty good vehicle - at least then you have proof of when you wrote your original idea, whereas if you gave a paper on the topic, or even just have an interesting conversation at the cocktail party afterward, then who knows where ideas originate (and no doubt ideas get "stolen" all the time just in that we are influenced more than we realize by things people say etc - that's quite a complicated area, really).
posted by mdn at 1:20 PM on April 2, 2008

(Sorry I don't have any more concrete thoughts on this, ap. I tend to share my work around only among people I know, and I don't post it anywhere like PRN, purely from not wanting to bother figuring this stuff out. The BL discussion was my best shot.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:42 PM on April 2, 2008

advil- I think the concern is with professional plagiarism, not student attempts. That is, the ideas and arguments in a draft could find their way into an article for a more established scholar, and the junior scholar wouldn't have much recourse since most people in the profession would tend to credit the senior scholar.

Ah, somehow I didn't even think of that. (I, perhaps also naively, believe I'm lucky enough to be in a field where it's very uncommon.) In that case you may be interested in this study (which I'm amazed I didn't think to connect with this post when I first answered it).
posted by advil at 5:10 PM on April 2, 2008

I should really have linked to the actual paper, which can be found here.
posted by advil at 5:18 PM on April 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]