Der Dieckmann

When I began to work with Zotero a few days ago, I found an article by Marc Sample about how and why he wants to share his library of citations and notes online. Sample, a professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies in the English Department at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, pleads for collaboration in the humanities and looks at Zotero as a very smart opportunity to do so.

Sample wrote:

“We are accustomed, in the humanities, to being very secretive about our research. [...] My sense is that we like to keep our collection of sources private as long as possible, holding them close to our chest as if we were gamblers in the great poker game of academia. And in this game, our colleagues are not colleagues, but opponents sitting across the table from us, bluffing perhaps, or maybe holding a royal flush. Proprietary software like Endnote, which by default encloses research libraries within a walled garden, reinforces this notion, that the engine of scholarship is competition rather than collaboration. [...] Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge.”

I think the Manhattan Project is as a metapher the wrong approach to describe reasons of secrecy in the field of science. I suggest to look at secrecy in science from a perspective of economy. Either, if you are a scientist or a scientific institute, it’s about being better than the competition to attract public or private funding. The question here naturally is what the criterias of the funder look like. And yes, maybe you become better throughout crowdsouring. But, who knows?. Or else, the knowledge work happens in the context of contract research with the aim of acquiring competitive advantages. How to involve the crowd in the process of innovation if you are bound to a non disclosure agreement? In both cases, Mancur Olson’s theory of collective action might fit. Acquired knowledge can only be made available as a collective good, if its author’s profit does not decrease because of making it available. The thing is: How to be sure that there will be a benefit of sharing throughout the effect of crowdsourcing on the one hand, if you risk to give away competitive advantages on the other hand? This question occurs as soon as things get connected to money. As a result, prudence requires restraint. Sharing and crowdsourcing are ideas I appreciate a lot. I see the hope on crowdsourcing as a strong argument for publishing my whole library. But I’m prudent too. Therefore, to me, it seems to make more sense to split my work between my private library and to share parts of it consciously in more or less public group libraries. In any respect, Zotero is great. Its success may also be related to the freedom of choice if and what you like to share.

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