Phil's observation hardly rambles--and departures from the
pedestrian are prized by a list-lurker like me. My thanks
for the
offering.
Garvey and Griffith offer a sharp reminder of the organizing
power of a discipline, which is designed to structure
consideration by vetting observations, assertions,
conclusions,
and other claims to truth in accredited ways: through
refereed
journal publishing; holding conferences and symposia;
promulgating standards, guidelines and best practices; and
so on.
But the more I think of this excerpt, the more it smacks of
tory
history in its willingness to label only as
"judicious" a process
that at times may also be arbitrary, retrograde, or
discriminatory. Leslie White was right when he said that
"science
is 'sciencing'", and my less than original point is
that the
"institution of science" amounts to a bunch of
people engaging in
a wide variety of practices related to what we might call
scientific enquiry motivated by desires to solve problems,
make
money, safeguard truth, investigate the unknown, and so
forth
into the sustained and varied drive of the ego. Converting
informal information into formal knowledge certainly is a
long
process, but in this bazaar of activities, it probably is
not as
judicious as Garvey and Griffith think it is.
And to Phil's question about keeping separate formal and
informal
communication processes, perhaps the issue is more about
establishing a continuum of work products for practitioners
for
them to ascribe value to what they encounter. I mean, has
the
enterprise of physics or economics been hurt or helped by
the
speedy transmission of informal information through e-mail,
e-print servers, and institutional repositories? And has the
presence of both sanctioned/published and
unsanctioned/pre-pub
materials in an IR really begun to dismantle science's walls
of
rigor?
--Joe Toth
Middlebury College
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l lists.yale.edu
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 9:22 PM
To: liblicense-llists.yale.edu
Subject: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal
communication channels
In the early 1970s, the American Psychological Association
entrusted two psychologists, William D. Garvey and Belver C.
Griffith to make sense of the "crisis in scholarly
communication." In doing so, they embarked on research
to first
better understand the communication processes of researchers
--
both the *informal* where most of the communication among
peers
is done, and the *formal* which describes the traditional
journal
and book publication process.
In one of their first published reports [1], the
psychologists
warn about formalizing the informal communication channels.
They
write,
"accelerating the flow of scientific information in the
informal
domain and expanding its dissemination is a problem
precisely
because it occurs in systems that obscure the boundary
between
the informal and formal domains. This boundary is one that
science has deliberately erected to curtail, temporarily,
the
flow of information until the information has been examined
against the current state of knowledge in a discipline.
Non-scientists view procedure of curtailment as
ultra-conservative; experienced, practicing scientists
perceive
it as the essential feature of science....The long judicious
procedure by which this conversion is made is unique to
science.
To reorganize it for the sake of speed, or for open
communication
with other spheres of intellectual endeavor, would almost
certainly dismantle the institution of science as we know it
today." (p.362)
Manuscript depositing mandates (e.g. Harvard, NIH, etc.)
could be
seen as essentially formalizing the informal. Most of the
discussion surrounding the debates have been on immediate
effects
(the time and resources devoted to archiving, the mechanisms
required to streamline the process). Little has been devoted
to
possible unintended consequences of such mandates.
Unintended
consequences are not necessarily negative [2], and I don't
want
to imply that I'm implying an argument against institutional
archiving. Still, is there reason to argue (like Garvey and
Griffith) that we should strive to keep the informal and
formal
communication processes separate?
--Phil Davis
[If these graduate student ramblings are tiresome, I'm happy
to
return to more pedestrian dialogs].
[1] Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1971). Scientific
communication: Its role in the conduct of research and
creation
of knowledge. American Psychologist, 26(4), 350-362.
[2] Merton, R. K. (1936). The Unanticipated Consequences of
Purposive Social Action. American Sociological Review,
1(6),
894-904.
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