Dear Alun,

You wrote, “ There is an interesting parallel between authorship in writing articles and authorship in designing. There are many examples of designers who claim that all work completed in their studio is solely authored by them, despite not having been directly involved in that particular project. A well known example is that of Raymond Lowey who hand signed all drawings completed by his employees. There are some local examples of designers not being given recognition for award winning designs.”

As I see it, this is a problematic analogy. It is not parallel for any of several reasons.

The first and most important difference between design studios and universities is that studios are anchored in the ancient guild culture while universities have built a distinct and different academic culture. The master or owner of a studio pays those who work for him and determines the basis on which work is attributed. This has been the case since prior to the formal organisation of guilds in the Middle Ages. It applies to the studios of Donatello and Vermeer, as well as to the contemporary studios of people such as Loewy. Many studios also use a corporate signature. Under all circumstances, the employees are paid for their work as hourly employees. In copyright law, this is known as “work for hire,” and the signature rights and copyright belong to the employer. It is the employer who decides who will sign and how.

If universities were to employ work for hire rules in the attribution of signature rights, then the signature rights would not belong to professors of any kind, nor to supervisors, department heads, centre directors, or even to deans. The ultimate signing authority would determine signatures — university presidents and vice chancellors, or even the boards of trustees.

However, there is a second reason. Work for hire also requires that the hired employee be paid for the work that he or she executes on behalf of the employer. When Loewy’s employees went home, their time was theirs. If a Loewy employee were to design an airplane or a chair or a bottle at home, Loewy would have had no right to sign it.

We do much of the work that goes into writing a research article outside the theoretical number of hours for which we are paid by a university. When I was a dean, I put in twice as many hours a week as an ordinary professor would do. Admittedly, those kinds of jobs entail that kind of work — but any writing I managed to do, I did at home. The truth is that most academics who work within a workload model do much the same. At many universities, there is a model that suggests a certain amount of time for teaching, a certain amount of time for service tasks, and the rest for research. I have observed that despite the supposed workload model, the teaching required and the tasks assigned often take a full work week, sometimes more. Anyone who manages to write does so on their own time.

The Vancouver Protocol and systems like it are a reasonable basis for signature attribution. Raymond Loewy’s studio and other work for hire systems do not form a parallel. If they did, the people who use positional authority within a system to assert signature rights over against real authors and co-authors would not be the Raymond Loewy-like people or the Donatellos of this world. It would be rather like one of Loewy’s senior employees signing a drawing or the head journeyman in charge of metal fabrication for Donatello signing the work. Instead of usurping the signature rights of a junior employee, they would be using positional authority to usurp the signature authority of the person who owns the firm or the studio.       

In the world of research, it is the researcher and members of the actual research and writing team to whom we award credit.

Yours,

Ken

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 












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