At 11:49 AM -0400 5/6/08, paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>I think in this day of web 2.0 science and knowledge being exchanged
>dynamically, we may have find ways to reference scientific and
>academic contributions which come into being from mailing lists and
>wikis. (01)
Indeed, and this is an area which is in flux and rather indeterminate
right now. (02)
>This is what IPR policies are for, right? (03)
Wrong. You are confusing IPR with academic good-conduct rules of
acknowledgement and priority of publication. the former are primarily
legally debated and arise over money; the latter are academically
debated and arise over issues of professional reputation and such
matters as tenure. (04)
>....should we just agree that
>what is published should be acknowledged, irrespective of where it is
>published? (05)
That depends on what counts as 'publishing'. For academic purposes,
this is usually understood to mean publication in some kind of
peer-reviewed forum, which Wikis and blogs and so on are clearly not.
As you say, the Web 2.0 phenomenon may cause this to (slowly) change,
but academics are extremely conservative when it comes to how they
conduct their own internal affairs, and until such bodies as tenure
review committees start changing their attitudes, I do not see the
central notion of 'academic publication' changing much. (06)
Academics are expected to be aware of publications in peer-reviewed
journals in their own field, so ignorance of prior publication there
is no excuse (and in any case, should be caught by later peer
reviewing); but nobody can be expected to read every wiki and blog
and newspaper and general-interest journal that comes out. (07)
I have personally given up on even trying to maintain a publication
trail for my own ideas, and in more and more cases have even
abandoned any attempt to have them all attributed. My name does not
appear anywhere on the ISO Common Logic standard, which I wrote
almost entirely (apart from appendices B and C), and I'm cool with
that, as I had the option of being the Editor and turned it down. And
I know in several cases I have re-invented an idea which has then
been published and only afterwards has it been noted that it (or
something very like it) had in fact been previously known. In some
cases, it is virtually impossible to reconstruct an accurate
attribution history, as some ideas were kind of half-known to an
entire community for a while, and only became sharp and crystallized
later, over an extended period of debate and discussion. With the
wisdom of hindsight it can then be argued that some particular
publication was the 'first' to have the idea, but in fact the idea
had not really been gotten clear enough at that time to be fully
attributable to any one source. Logic programming is a good example.
The invention of the basic idea here has been attributed to R.
Kowalski, A. Colmerauer, C. Green (who received an award for it), C.
Hewitt and myself, and possibly to others. In fact, what is now
called Logic Programming evolved over a period of several years, and
all these people, and others, were involved in the discussions and
idea development at the time, all with different agendas and
emphases. Prolog was invented by Colmerauer; both Kowalski and myself
came up with the idea embodied in the slogan "algorithm= logic +
control"; Hewitt invented Planner, which was structurally similar to
Prolog in some ways but did not present itself explicitly as a logic;
and so on. One could list a dozen influential projects from that
period which were similar in some way and might be called 'the first'
logic programming system; and all these descriptions would have a
taint of truth, but all be ultimately wrong. (08)
Pat Hayes (09)
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