The Jotter of Rotter

To be honest, Weller’s discussion of digital scholarship (chapter 4) leaves me conflicted. While I would definitely appreciate more open access to scholarship online, I am also worried about the abuse.

1. Authorship – the now classic New Yorker cartoon (below) applies to academic authorship as well. Of course,the open access would make it also possible to improve on articles or other scholarly “products” (databases, collections, ..), the peer-review process would widen the scope of the input. Also, the “damn third reviewer” could now be multiplied by x. Especially for controversial research this could lead to endless discussions that, in the end, do not lead to an improvement. On the other hand, such an exchange would be beneficial. But when do you draw the line and say this article is the best it can be?

2. Copyright – I am waiting to see if the New Yorker will come after me for posting this cartoon on my blog. Working in the field of visual communication and having gone through the process of securing print permissions for images in research article and paying handsomely for them, I wonder if the current copyright laws would not be a hindrance to open scholarship. Further complicating the matter is the question what copyright laws apply. We have to keep in mind that the Internet is not an U.S.  enterprise. An example: I am trying to include in an article a German poster from the 1920s that I found on a published CD of a prominent German poster collection (German Historical Museum). The said collection had been expropriated by the Nazis in the 1930s from a Jewish collector and has been given back recently to his grandson who lives in Miami, FL. He puts those posters up for auction later this month. Which copyright law applies? Oh, and also, the artist who designed the poster has died less than 90 years ago (=cutoff to be considered in the public domain).

3. Plagiarism – Somewhat connected to the last point: will open scholarship also be open to more plagiarism by our students? In Germany, two government ministers had to step down within the last two years since it was detected that both had plagiarized significantly on their PhD theses. While plagiarism might be easier to be detected on the B.A. / B.S. level graduate students might not be immune to it either. One could argue that plagiarizing minds will always find a way to do it, would open scholarship make it even easier for them?