Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science
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Advance praise for Scientific Authorship'. ‘“ What is an author?’ is a question that has been central to cultural and literary studies for almost thirty years. This collection of essays opens up genuinely new perspectives on this question and shows us how much science studies has to contribute to fundamental issues in the humanities.” —Arnold I. Davidson, University of Chicago This page intentionally left blank SC I E N T I F I C A u t h o r s h ip Credit and Intellectual Property in Science ED ITE D BY M a r io B ia g io l i & P e t e r G a l is o n |J Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2003 by Routledge Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2003 by Taylor 8c Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. “Uncommon Controversies” is abridged and adapted by permission of the publisher and the author from Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property by Corynne McSherry, pp. 68-100, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 13: 978-0-415-94293-5 (hbk) C o n t e n t s A cknowledgments VII Introduction I MARIO BIAGIOLI AND PETER GALISON PART i: EMERGENCE OF AUTHORSHIP 1. F o u c a u l t ’s C h ia s m u s 13 Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries ROGER CHARTIER 2. B u t t er fo r P a r s n ip s 3 3 Authorship, Audience, and the Incomprehensibility of the Principia ROB ILIFFE 3. T he A m b iv a l e n c e o f A u t h o r s h ip in Early M o d e r n N a t u r a l P h il o s o p h y 6 7 ADRIAN JOHNS A. The Uses of Anonymity in the Age of Reason 91 MARY TERRALL 5. C an A r t is a n s B e S c ie n t if ic A u t h o r s ? I 13 The Unique Case of Fraunhofer’s Artisanal Optics and the German Republic of Letters MYLES W. JACKSON 6 . "A V ery H a r d N ut to C r a c k ” 133 or Making Sense of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Mid-Victorian Cambridge ANDREW WARWICK PART II: LIMITS OF AUTHORSHIP 7. E m e r g e n t R e l a t io n s 1 65 MARILYN STRATHERN 8. B e y o n d A u t h o r s h ip 1 95 Refiguring Rights in Traditional Culture and Bioknowledge PETER JASZI AND MARTHA WOODMANSEE 9 . U n c o m m o n C ontroversies 225 Legal Mediations of Gift and Market Models of Authorship CORYNNE MCSHERRY PART III: THE FRAGMENTATION OF AUTHORSHIP IO. R ig h t s o r R e w a r d s ? 253 Changing Frameworks of Scientific Authorship MARIO BIAGIOLI I I. T he D eath o f t h e A u t h o r s o f D eath 2 81 Prestige and Creativity among Nuclear Weapons Scientists HUGH GUSTERSON 12. " D is c o u r s e s o f C ircumstance ” 3 0 9 A Note on the Author in Science HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER 13. T he C o l l e c t iv e A u t h o r 3 2 5 PETER GALISON PART IV: COMMENTARIES E nd C r e d it s 3 5 9 TOM CONLEY W hat Is N o t a S c ie n t if ic A u t h o r ? 3 6 9 MARK ROSE CONTRIBUTORS 3 7 3 INDEX 3 7 5 A cknowledgments This volume has developed from the papers presented at the confer ence on “What Is a Scientific Author?” held at Harvard in March 1997 with support from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Harvard University. We would like to thank Elizabeth Lee, Beatrice Lewin Dumin, Colin Milburn, Alisha Rankin, Elly Truitt, and especially Kristina Stewart for all their help in preparing the manuscript for publication. This page intentionally left blank Introduction MARIO BIAGIOLI AND PETER GALISON More than thirty years ago Michel Foucault reframed the analysis of authorship by asking questions that were simultaneously theoretical and mundane, questions that cut across disciplines as diverse as bibli ography, philosophy, literary studies, history, and library management. What does it mean to classify a certain body of texts as belonging to a certain author? How do categories of author and work relate to and constitute each other? Is the name of the author like any other personal noun, or does it have other functions? How does the relationship between the authors name and the epistemological status of claims vary across different disciplines? What does that tell us about the discursive regimes in which those disciplines operate?1 Studies of authorship have covered much ground and have spread in many different directions since the appearance of Foucault s “What Is an Author?” The function of the author has become a standard research question in literary studies, history of the book, legal studies, art and film history, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and gender studies.2 In recent years these issues have moved from academic to public discourse, propelled by the development of Internet culture, the aggressive use of intellectual property law by corporations eager to regiment global markets, and growing concerns about the appro priation of public knowledge and cultural heritages resulting from these corporate trends.3 However, despite the increasing visibility of these issues across disciplines and cultural spheres, scientific author- 2 INTRODUCTION ship has attracted very little attention—at least from the humanities and social sciences. But if scientific authorship has yet to become an object of scholarly and philosophical discourse, it has been the cause of great professional concern among the scientists, especially in today’s vast, multiauthor collaborations. The assignment of credit in large-scale biological, computer science, and physics collaborations is a major issue for young scientists; it hits every aspect of their career trajectories, from thesis writing to hiring and promotion. Physicists have long been debating what the Nobel Prize means in an age when two thousand scientists sign a single paper. The hundreds of authors listed in the byline of a biomedical paper reporting the result of a large clinical trial ask the same questions about the meaning and definition of authorship. And so do the editors of the journals who review those manuscripts, and the academic committees, departmental chairs, and deans who have to make hiring or tenure decisions based on CVs listing those publica tions. For all these reasons, the authorship debate in science has been entirely practical, and has generated thousands of administrative memos, policy statements, guidelines, articles, editorials, reports, and heated letters to the editor.4 These issues, however, have important theoretical implications. Given the combination of literary, philosophical, economic, historical, and scientific issues raised by scientific authorship, it would seem a perfect site for an encounter between many kinds of scholarship. And motivations for this convergence would not seem to be lacking given the remarkable concerns about intellectual property found at all levels of science and technology policy and, increasingly, in everyday univer sity life.5 While the U.S. government has become concerned with the intellectual property status of the genome, universities engage more intimately with the private sector for funding and collaborations, and rely more frequently and aggressively on intellectual property law to mobilize their “knowledge capital.”6 In a time when whole academic departments sell intellectual rights of first refusal to pharmaceutical companies, any university ignoring such issues would be hiding its collective head in the sand. And the trend is not limited to science and engineering. Some universities, for instance, are expanding their intel lectual property claims down to course syllabi in the hope that they may INTRODUCTION 3 be turned into profitable resources for distance-learning ventures. This means that, for the first time, academics from all ranks and disciplines are witnessing the arrival of intellectual property law on campus and have to confront, usually with unease, the tensions between the tradi tional ethos of academic authorship and the logic of property and the market. But if some of the problems and tensions that have long char acterized scientific authorship are now beginning to be experienced or perceived by a much wider range of academics, this has not translated into cross-disciplinary reflections on the nature and problems of acad emic and scientific authorship. For instance, most discussions of scientific authorship have not shared many questions or tools with other kinds of authorship studies. To the extent that history of science and science studies have taken up the question of authorship, it has largely been to reduce the function of authorship to the construction of authority: Whose word counts in pre senting scientific results? How does this authority shape the conduct and resolution of scientific disputes? In this sense, science studies has asked questions that are comparable to those posed by literary studies when it analyzes the construction of the authorial voice.