I noticed in passing a flurry of controversy over this year’s Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, the annual publication that incorporates the essays that have been prepared in advance for the Society’s conference (published, so that they don’t have to be read aloud at the meeting, and participants can proceed directly to discussing the merits of the papers). It turns out that the Seminar Papers now bear an explicit reservation against the works being “quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author” — a novel gesture, and one that hardly anyone, if anyone at all, has observed in the past.
Links to the preceding contributions:
Mark Goodacre here, here, here, and here
Jim Davila here and here
Stephen Carlson here and here
Ruben Gomez here
Paul Nikkel here
It’s great to see my colleagues getting all worked up about one of my favorite topics. As you might expect, I’m firmly in the camp of those who regard this as a spasmodic contraction of the failing muscles of the moribund model of print publication. Jim frames this as a fair-use problem, and that certainly plays in; in his second post, Jim does a lovely job of eviscerating the argument against citing these essays. Publication is publication; if you don’t want people crediting you with having expressed ideas in public, then don’t express them in public.
But more important, the whole issue points to the extent to which this constituency of academia has yet to come to terms with the changes — and especially the opportunities — that online publication entails. Trevor and I have been knocking ourselves out, trying to find people who were willing to publish their work online at all. We’ve encountered all varieties of resistance, to what will be a matter of uninteresting fact in a few years. Rather than seeing the positive implications for disseminating scholarly debate over biblical topics, the guild responded with fear and with futile clutching after an illusory control.
Margaret — here for the weekend, soon to be gone again — points out that in Paul Griffith’s recent terrific book Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity, he cites the theological malignity of thinking about words and ideas as subject to ownership. The truth, after all, cannot be owned; if we speak the truth, we need to renounce anxieties about owning our words. That which is original and our own, after all, depends on a source other than, less reliable than God. To the extent that our expressions bespeak the truth, they escape our ownership, and to the extent that we cling to ownership of our expressions, we distance them from the truth. . . .
Posted by AKMA at September 26, 2004 08:56 PM | TrackBackDear AKMA,
I, too, have a strong view about quoting or otherwise citing orally presented papers, and I think that they should not be quoted or cited, unless the presenter gives explicit permission. This holds especially when it is common knowledge between presenter and audience that the paper presented is a work in progress, as seems to be the case at the SBL conference:
Because these papers represent works in progress, they should not be quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author. (Quoted from the SBL website to which you link in your post.)
The primary reason for my view is that if it is accepted that orally presented papers will not be cited, then the academic community benefits immensely by conferences and colloquia, the lifeblood of the sharing of ideas, being fora in which one may try out new ideas without fear of being lumbered with them for the rest of one's academic career should they be entirely wrong, which is the case more often than not. Having such an understanding of oral presentations encourages academic creativity, especially thinking out of the proverbial box. It also encourages a sense of collegiality and community because the audience may help in the development of the presenter's ideas before they are immortalised in the learned journals. The loss to the academic community by being barred from citing orally presented papers is minimal--if one wishes to target a view one has learned of only through an orally presented paper, one can always use locutions such as 'it might be thought that . . .'. So on a cost/benefit approach, it seems to me that a policy of not citing orally presented papers wins hands down over the contrary policy.
Perhaps these rather obvious considerations have been discussed previously. (I haven't the time to go through all the links you provide on the controversy.) Apologies if I have merely repeated a common view.
Reading a lot of S.T. Coleridge of late, this topic reminds me of his sad reputation as a plagarist even in some of his most famous works, e.g., the Biographia Literaria. I notice recently that this reputation followed him in the publication of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. There are more than a few instances of his use of Lessing's language in "Kleine Shriften". J.H. Green, the editor of the CoaIS, makes apologies for the apparent fact. He says, that Coleridge himself often acknowledged his many readings of Lessing, considering them a masterpiece of style and argument. In the end Green says that STC's commitment was to a wider, more coherent point than Lessing who was more narrowly concerned and that STC had a fundamental commitment to the truth, which cannot be owned.
Posted by: Mark Diebel at September 27, 2004 07:27 AM