Time Higher Ed feature article on authorship disputes

I’m busy copyediting the Better Posters book and grading and teaching, but I wanted to stick my head out of my hole to point to a great feature article in Times Higher Education on the subject of authorship disputes.

I have a few quotes in this article. It’s clearly an outcome of the paper on authorship disputes I published over a year ago now. (Sometimes, you’re so busy with one project you forget about the “long tail” of earlier projects.) I was also lucky that I’ve talked to journalist Jack Grove before and was in his email contact list

I’m rather amused that while I chose to illustrate these conflicts with a picture of chess pieces, the Times chose... hockey. As a Canadian, I can do nothing but approve.

External links

What can be done to resolve academic authorship disputes?
Whose Paper is it Anyway? A Discussion on Authorship (Illustration)

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You think you deserved authorship, but didn’t get it. Now what? 
How wasting time on the internet led to my new authorship disputes paper

What’s worth stealing? Academic edition

I heard someone ask this recently at a conference, “What if someone steals your ideas?”

I have good news:

Nobody wants to steal your ideas.

Especially in academia. As I’ve said before, ideas a cheap. Not worthless, but not worth much. Once you have been in academia a while, there are so many ideas floating around that you will quickly realize the list of ideas you want to put into action vastly exceeds the ones that you can put into action.

I think this is why concern about “stealing ideas” surfaces with early career individuals or novices. They are still at the point where they don’t know the map of the territory. They don’t know what has or has not been done, so they don’t have a clear idea of where the fertile ground for ideas lies or what is practical. It’s sort of like kids who think “Everything has been invented already.”

Stealing ideas isn’t worth it.

When you look at what problems around intellectual property in academia, it’s usually about someone stealing completed work.

Stealing data, plagiarism, duplicate publication, or insisting you be added as an author to a paper you did not contribute to – all of those stealing completed work. That’s what you need to worry about and protect. Not your ideas.

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Ideas are cheap