To bring this out, consider the following case. A journal has an online version that gets published prior to the printed version. After a paper has been published online but before it has been printed, the author wishes to change something before it hits print. It is wrong to have different versions of the paper online and in print, so there are two choices, change the online version per the author’s wishes and have these changes in the print version, or change nothing. The problem with the first choice is that people might have already read and cited the changed material. And if the journal does make a change it undermines the integrity of the online version as a source of citation.

Authors publishing drafts online is similar. Given that they are drafts, they are subject to change and so not citable. The usual qualification ‘without permission’ allows the author the ability to exercise judgment about particular cases. This seems like a reasonable practice.

In fact, putting something up on the web is probably the best protection possible, because as long as you date it, if you care you can always point to the fact that your instantiation of the idea predates other appearances, if it really is the case that you are first with it. And, if you are too shy or too dignified to do that, others will notice anyway, if you are lucky.

Does this include citing someone’s response to a point you’ve made when presenting work in a public forum (eg in a departmental seminar or at a conference).

The reason I ask is that a) this has happened to me a couple of times b)on the occasions that it has happened I only found out about it circumstantially c) on both occasions I was pretty chuffed (pleased) about it and d) I don’t suppose it would have happened if the person referring to the point I had made had felt the need to email me about it. (and e), the points made had very little to do with my published work – such as it is.)

So I’d be less happy than I am if this sort of convention was observed. But it seems odd to have conventions about stuff posted on the web that protect it more than points made in the seminar room.

I would really like to know whether Douglas Knight is right and that there is a convention that this request isn’t to be taken literally. I’ve certainly been reading it as such. So if there is such a convention, it’s perhaps not widely understood that there is such a convention.

The request has certainly caused confusion. I have set (with the author’s permission) works in progress with that request as reading for some of my classes, and I’ve had students worried about whether or not they can cite the paper in their exam!

Sorry for the confusion over the term ‘public domain’. I certainly didn’t mean it in any legal sense. I only meant that if you put something on the web that seems to me to be making it available for public consumption – as such, it seems odd to place a restriction on it being cited.

The case of an author changing their mind is an interesting one. I know of a case of an author writing a very interesting paper on a topic but changing his mind on the whole approach to that topic, and so the original paper remains unpublished. But some of us think his original idea was better than where he’s ended up. What can we do? He doesn’t want that paper cited, because he thinks it’s a completely wrong approach. We want to build on that earlier paper and give him credit for the groundwork, but he doesn’t want credit for the groundwork, because he thinks it’s mistaken. To present it as if we came up with the initial ideas ourselves would be terrible, so basically we’re stuck with these ideas that we can’t do anything with. That doesn’t seem quite right to me.

But the difficulty is that papers presented at conferences are now often expected to be posted online.

I think there’s some room for discrimination among online sources. Something that’s put on SSRN or equivalent is, like papers in official “working paper” series, game for citation as-is. But something posted to the website of a big conference might just be a conference presentation, and there ought to be space for conference presentations to be experimental or incomplete or just wrong.

Alan:
Except that, once you post something on the Web, at least 70% of the people who view it will have found it via search, including such off-the-wall searches as kieran+healy+nude+jpeg or hot+philospher+porn, completely outside the scholarly community and with no attachment whatsoever to academic values of fair play.

Apart from the entertainment value of what Alan just added to google, I think this seems wrong. Such web-surfers who are entirely “outside the scholarly community” aren’t going to have any itnerest in even clicking through to most online working papers, even if the papers happen to turn up in their searches for hot philosopher porn.

It seems to me that this is relevant. One point of both citation conventions and of copyright law is to give people credit where it is due. But in both cases you don’t want the relevant rules to stifle further work. Once I have seen an idea presented by someone else I would be doing something wrong if I wrote something based on it without giving credit. But if I hadn’t seen that idea I could and perhaps even would have come up with it myself. If we had a practice where on the one hand we require citation of sources when they are sources, but on the other hand allow those who web-publish to restrain citation of their ideas we would be keeping people from further creative work of the sort we would all like to see. (I believe considerations of this sort went into the formulation of patent law and also copyright law which includes the doctrine of fair use.)

These considerations lead me to think that a practice which favors asking those who request that permission be granted for such permission to cite is OK, but only if the permissible responses at that point will either be (1) yes, go ahead cite me, or (2) don’t cite me, but you may use the ideas without attribution. There should not the a third option of don’t cite me, and don’t publish anything based on what I said until I publish my paper in some other way. That last option would stifle research we may well want to promote. We all know of some people who are just too perfectionist to ever get around to publishing their ideas in final form and we should not allow them to keep us from talking about stuff just because they thought of it first.

These remarks come from someone whose discipline is philosophy and I may therefore be missing points relevant to other fields because of my background.

I do think that a bunch of grad students/early career researchers are worried that (a) they’ll be missing a trick if they don’t put work up online; and (b) that doing so risks the best ideas being taken up in such a way as to damage their chances of getting the paper published. I personally feel (b) isn’t something to worry about so much, but I do think that people have heartfelt concerns over this. And so it’d be natural if they interpreted the notes we’re talking about—- perhaps wrongly—- as addressing their concerns.

I like some of the suggestions given above: e.g. putting something into the title of work in progress to indicate this, and if one wishes, to put a note in inviting people to contact you for updated versions. Those sort of proposals just seem less open to misinterpretation than the one under discussion.

Another theory I’ve had is that they actually mean “cite but don’t quote.” I’ve always been absolutely certain that they weren’t to be taken literally, but had some well-defined meaning inside each field that used them. Brian and Ross seem to deny the existence of a convention and take the line literally. In particular, Ross’s discussion of the hypothetical that one would not be given permission to cite is, I think, the problem with the discussion. The denial is simply unacceptable, at least in the conventions (perhaps from other fields) I read in the comments here.

Ummm . . . 90% of that 70% won’t do anything the author doesn’t want done; reading is okay, only citation and the like are not. So maybe it’s like putting an open sack of subway tokens on your front stoop, when the only place the subway goes is the library.

In any case, I can’t see why the risks the author takes is a sound reason for ignoring her or his preferences.

Except that, once you post something on the Web, at least 70% of the people who view it will have found it via search, including such off-the-wall searches as kieran+healy+nude+jpeg or hot+philospher+porn, completely outside the scholarly community and with no attachment whatsoever to academic values of fair play. It’s sort of like putting an open sack of gold coins on your front stoop along with a sign that says “Please don’t steal.”