On the "appropriation" wank that has been occupying a fair portion of my flist

[petronia]

You people are way too nice, you know that? XD; Too nice, too disinclined to raise a fuss, too willing to give the benefit of the doubt, too worried about jumping the gun and hurting someone else's feelings. I'm talking from the inside of a glass house here because I'm like that too. Short of someone completely C&Ping my work and claiming it as their own, I cannot really bring myself to care - in The Real World these issues are settled with money, and it's not like I'm making any off my LJ/fandom activities to begin with. (The people who care a lot, I suspect, come to it from the POV of "in Academia these issues are settled with reputation.")

Thing is, if you're one person, you're being nice. If you're ten people, you're sending the message that it's okay. So I have learnt a lesson from being on the outside of this kerfuffle.

Comments

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[cis.livejournal.com]

in the humanities, though, I've seen entire friendships and academic relationships ruined over the question of who came up with an idea first, and who ought to have credited whom. Obviously there are tight groups of sympathetic thinkers who are very good at sharing ideas in common, and who want their mutual ideas to be talked about as much as possible in order to gain as much traction as possible. But there's also this pesky thing where one has to be constantly published in order to keep one's job - if someone you met at a party writes an article that jumps the gun on a theory you're basing a book around, and you're sure the theory was new to them when you told it, that person has essentially pushed you back down the ladder in order to get a few rungs forward. You're going to have to go back to your manuscript and add a bit that says "as [partygoer] says in [international journal of stealin]", or else you look like you're not up to date with what's happening in your discipline, or like you're trying to steal their idea uncredited. And this is galling.

Also: consider the case of Rosalind Franklin.

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[emblem.livejournal.com]

True. Though I was talking of copying, not so much stealing data in a way such that the it becomes completely unpublishable, which is what happened to Franklin. Franklin didn't get to publish at all. (This is worse. Yes. It's just not what I meant in my comment.)

(Though, in the high-throughput data sets of today, a whole bunch of groups can mine a 11-gig sequencing file and publish lots of times on it.)

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[troisroyaumes]

Heck, even a single group can publish ten papers from one data set (coughManolisKelliscough).

Franklin did publish, by the way; she has a paper in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick. Of course, W&C precedes her in page number, and well, sexism being what it was, everyone focused on the two young dashing up&comers.

Re: commenting on the 'academia' bit

[emblem.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't believe I DID NOT KNOW THAT. *shameface*

(Well now I do!)