Dear Jillian and John,

Thanks for your notes. I’ll give your notes some consideration.

The issue of ethics clearance works differently in different nations. Australian universities have a particularly rigorous and technical process. This is not the case elsewhere, particularly not when asking for individual accounts that will be kept confidential and rendered anonymous. While I would have required ethics clearance for this in Australia, this issue would not arise in other places. I am affiliated with two universities: neither is in Australia. 

Was I note, several people have already written me to tell their stories, including the emails that led me to launch this thread. While I was assuming that this would function for what will effectively be a viewpoint piece rather than an empirical study, your note correctly points out that this may not be the case. To be safe, I’ll check with both my universities.

If there is a problem with requesting stories, effectively a journalistic request, I’ll write a theoretical viewpoint piece.

As I wrote earlier, most people won’t address this issue without doing a full study — and most people have other research areas with other priorities. So do I. That’s the case for me, too. I have hoped that at least a few people who work in fields such as educational administration, research ethics, or publishing ethics would take this seriously enough to do a full study, but there have been few articles on the specific topic of forced gift signatures. Even the articles that mention them only discuss them in a larger context, f.ex. Kwok (2005) or Macfarlane (2017). I’m willing to do a small one-off study. I’m not about to change my research field to educational administration, research ethics, or publishing ethics, and I can’ät shift my research to focus on these kinds of issues.

John, let me note that I am NOT discussing the important but different problem of allocation of authorship credit between people and among the people who actually participate in a research project where only some of those people do the physical act of writing and editing. The Vancouver Protocol and other protocols and credit-allocation systems give proper consideration to all these issues.

I am ONLY discussing the demand for authorship by people who use positional power in the academic world to sign articles that they have not written and would have no right to sign if they did not exercise control over the author in some way.

Examples:

In one Australian research centre, the director told each new employee that he or she must include the centre director’s name on every publication produced during the time that he or she was employed. This demand included post-doctoral research fellows hired to develop the work begun in their doctoral thesis, work in which the centre director played no part at any time, before or after the award of the PhD. The ostensible argument was, “Since you work in my centre and I sign off on your pay check, everything you do as my employee should include me.”

A professor who worked in Taiwan China left his former university and moved to a mainland university in the People’s Republic of China because he was uncomfortable with the culture of forced gift signatures at his university. While he was reluctant to disclose cases and examples, he stated clearly that senior professors and those with position power routinely inflated their publication records by requiring the people whom they supervised as doctoral supervisors or as employees to include them as co-authors on all publications.

The person whose email to me caused me to start this thread essentially complained of pressure to include an author with positional power on a paper with which the would-be co-author has had nothing to do at any time. This person is a PhD student who is still in the university where the problem is taking place, so I will not even mention the nation. 

People who have acceded to such requests are afraid to state that they have done so. If they do, they will — as lead authors — often be guilty of violating the authorship ethics statements they sign on publication. In a way, this is what novelists and script-writers would call “the perfect crime.” It’s as though a bank robber were to hold up a bank by going from teller to teller to demand their cash at gun-point, while a teller whose bank had been robbed would go to jail for disclosing any information that could lead police to the robber. At the same time, because the actual robber is a member of the local social and financial elite, the authorities are reluctant to follow leads to robber even when a teller dares to provide information.

In most of the cases known to me, the victims move on — and people who disapprove move on. No one I know has been willing to take these issues up in public lest they become identified as troublemakers.

As I wrote earlier, I dropped this article once before when the editor whom I approached simply wanted too much work to prove that these problems really take place. 

The editor said — as others do — this is a terrible problem. I agree with you that this is wrong. I am sure that you are right to say that it happens. Even though I believe you, there is no way to demonstrate that this really happens. While I personally believe that you are right to state that it doesn’t, as an editor, I cannot accept an article without evidence that this really happens. Further, there is no way to determine the extent of the problem.

Some of the replies in the earlier thread titled “Who Should Sign an Article? Who Shouldn’t?” described other problems and different situations.  

While Nigel Cross’s comments are correct on the different problem of poor articles that editors reject due to quality that could be improved with senior researcher involvement and better supervision. This is a different problem. This problem that concerns me here involves forced gift signatures on articles and conference papers that ARE accepted because the quality warrants acceptance as far as reviewers and editors are concerned. The problem here is that not all of the credited authors have worked on the article in question. Rather, one or more listed co-authors have required the actual lead author to include them by improperly using their positional authority to do so backed by direct or implicit threats in the author’s present job or the ability to influence future opportunities.

While Alun Price was right about design studios where the head of the studio signs work — and this would cover other examples of work for hire — forced gift signatures constitute a different situation.

And I agree with John Vines completely on crediting all contributors to an article. In some fields, it is common to see an article signed by dozens of authors, even hundreds. A 2015 physics paper written by a research team at the CERN Large Hadron Collider holds the record with 5,154 co-authors. The first nine pages of 33 carry the article, including references. The remaining 24 pages list authors and their institutions (Castelvecchi 2015).

I’m certainly aware of cases where someone who is deeply involved in writing an article should NOT sign. I work carefully with my PhD students, marking up drafts and carefully annotating sections with questions, suggested references, comments on thinking and structure, and more. At the same time, this is the student’s work — not mine. And it is my view that a really skilled supervisor will help a student in such a way that at the end of the thesis, the student knows more about the subject than the supervisor does. In one case of a PhD student on whose thesis I worked as an editor and an uncredited supervisor a few years back, we started to develop so many new ideas that we have been talking about reworking the thesis now into an academic book. 

Another case where I would never sign is that of serving as English-language editor for a best-selling author who writes English as a second language. I helped to shape the text on a number of his books, working closely, raising questions, even suggesting ideas. But these books were his work — I couldn’t have written them, and I was not a co-author.

As editor of She Ji, I am often deeply involved in our articles. Because we are a hybrid interdisciplinary journal, we want our articles to be clear and comprehensible to a wide audience that include researchers and scholars from many fields, as well as practicing professionals, and leaders from business, industry, and government. As a result, we work with authors by annotating possible problems, identifying gaps in argumentation, suggesting issues to cover, and doing much of the work that an editor does who is nevertheless not the author. In a different context some of these tasks might fit the terms of the Vancouver Protocol. In this context it does not: it is our job to help an authors make the most of his or her research for the benefit of our readers. We also employ a full-time copy editor for a last look and careful language edit on every article. While she is deeply involve in the final version, she is not a co-author. She is a copy editor — and important and valued service Ast some research journals and many magazines and newspapers.  

The issue that has concerned me in the last thread and this one doesn’t involve people who might plausibly have some kind of claim to subsidiary co-authorship. It doesn’t involve people who work in teams, contributing to an article as legitimate co-authors even though they do not write a word. This issue only involve intellectual piracy by people who force others to credit them for work they have not done. If this were a movie, I’d call them villains. This would not be the congenial kind of villain played by Gene Hackman as Joe Moore, the criminal mastermind of the 2001 David Mamet movie, Heist. This would be the sinister villain Gene Hackman as the tough sheriff Little Bill Daggett in the 1992 Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven. Little Bill is a bully who keeps order by abusing his positional power, and most of the audience is happy to see him meet his fate at the business end of a Spencer rifle.

I don’t suggest that we identify or shame any specific villains here, much less pack them away Clint Eastwood style. I would like to get a better idea of how widespread this kind of villainy is, at least in our field, and how it works in specific anonymised cases. 

That said, I’m not sure whether I will go further. I take Jillian’s point seriously, and John’s point about people inadvertently using the “reply all” function. 

Therefore, I withdraw my research request while I give these issues some thought. 

Yours, 

Ken

References

Castelvecchi, Davide. 2015. “Physics paper sets record with more than 5000 authorsDetector teams at the Large Hadron Collider collaborated for a more precise estimate of the size of the Higgs boson.” Nature News, 15 May, 2015. DOI: 10.1038/nature.2015.17567 Accessed at URL: 
https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567

Kwok, L. S. 2005. “The White Bull effect: abusive coauthorship and publication parasitism.” The Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 31, Issue 9, pp. 554-556. 
DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme.2004.010553

Macfarlane, Bruce. 2017. The ethics of multiple authorship: power performativity and the gift economy.” Studies in Higher Education, Vol. 42, No. 7. pp. 1194-1210 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1085009

—

Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Eminent Scholar | College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning | University of Cincinnati ||| Email  [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 


—

Jillian Hamilton wrote:

—snip—

Ken, You would need Ethical Clearance to request, collect and publish such information. Since you are writing about ethical behaviour this is especially important. 
Warm regards

Jillian

Professor Jillian Hamilton | PhD, PFHEA
Director - Research, Innovation, and Impact
Learning and Teaching Unit | QUT
—snip—

—

John Vines wrote:

—snip—

Hi Ken,

While I can see the inherent value of conducting research on this topic, I'm a little alarmed here at the circumnavigating of research ethics protocols like informed consent and true anonymous data collection protocols here. I don't feel "I don't have the time" as a real excuse for not conducting ethically sensitive and carefully thought through research - especially if your intention here is to gather data (or "evidence") that will be taken seriously by the community and also sets a good example to PhD researcher (which, if I recall, was the original intention of this mailing list back in the day). I find myself asking how a request like this would go down if a PhD student not known to the community would have asked it.

I'm also especially concerned about requests like this being sent around a mailing list where so many people have accidently "replied all" so many times over the years.

Just to add my two pennies to this debate as well - I've worked in a couple of large, multidisciplinary, and highly collaborative research groups over the last 8 or so years where people in the groups - including doctoral researchers - are often working across more than one project in parallel, in collaboration with postdocs and academics (their supervisors, as well as collaborators outside their supervisory committees). These are often complex projects, where different team members may have responsibility for different work packages or activities - some more conceptual, some more methodological, some more data gathering and analysis, some more design and technical, etc - and when it comes to publications it is very often hard to fully delineate and separate all these contributions out. Indeed, in some of the more participatory work I've been involved in we've had many non-"academic" co-researchers be co-authors on papers, as a means to signify the importance of their contributions to the outcomes or process of the research, and in the spirit of writing with, rather than writing about.

I remember in my early days working in groups like these being questioned by those outside about whether I was happy with adding all these authors (and, specifically, the group leaders) to "my" papers - and then usually surprising them when I could honestly say every single author on every single paper I had worked on had contributed directly, and significantly, to the completion of the work presented.

I'm certainly not saying gift signatures do not happen - but not everything meets the initial eye. I also think there is a danger here of fixating this conversation around a single imagined idea of what a PhD is in design, without accounting for how much contemporary design research is collaborative and team based.
 
Cheers,

John.
—snip—




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