Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be!
A little over a decade ago, a friend confided in me about something that was troubling her. She had made a point during the Q-and-A portion of an academic workshop, a point that wasn’t exactly a game-changer, but which had generated a lot of excited discussion. Not long afterward, my friend discovered that her mentor—who had also been present at the workshop—was planning to write a paper about something that, well, sounded an awful lot like what my friend had said. But whenever my friend’s mentor mentioned the paper, it was without any reference to the point my friend had made.
My friend confessed that she felt a little uncomfortable, not to mention a little annoyed. After all, it had been her observation that had gotten people talking! But now it seemed like that important fact—the fact that the original observation had been hers to begin with—had been forgotten. True, she wasn’t exactly planning on writing up anything about it herself in the immediate future. But shouldn’t it be noted somewhere that she had been the first person to make that point?
Whose idea was it, anyway?
That friend’s frustration has stuck with me for more than a decade because it relates to a very serious problem in academia: how can we ensure that our precious-but-unpublished ideas stay ours?
We all know that blatant plagiarism is a bad thing. As I’ve written about before in PBP, even self-plagiarism is a no-no. But what do we do when our ideas aren’t yet published? What do we do when all we have is a thought, a question, or a point made during a workshop discussion? If we’ve come up with a brilliant argument or an innovative methodology but we haven’t formally published on it yet, what can we do to ensure that someone else doesn’t nab our idea before we can get it into a peer-reviewed journal (which, as you’ll know from last week’s post, can literally take years)?
Graduate students and ECRs are the most vulnerable when it comes to protecting their original ideas. For one thing, they may not know just how original their ideas are at first—they’re newer to the academic game, and they’re less likely than a more senior academic to be able to write up a new piece of research from scratch and publish it quickly. On rare but horrible occasions, this can even mean that their ideas get poached by the very people they rely on the most: their supervisors. (Yup. I’m appalled, too. But it does happen.)
So what can you do to prevent this from happening to you?
Plant your flag
While peer-reviewed publication may be the gold standard when it comes to claiming an idea as yours, there are some things you can do a lot earlier:
Talk about it. At conferences, that is. If you look into the footnotes of most academic journals, you’ll often see scholars citing conference papers that they or colleagues are working up for publication. Conference papers are citable! Heck, so are podcasts!
Get on social media. The Site Formerly Known as Twitter may not be an academic journal (or anything close), but it is citable, according to the entry on ‘Social Media’ in the 9th edition of the MLA’s Citation Guide.
Blog it. Likewise, there are many fabulous research blogs out there that feature work in progress, and they are also citable. If you don’t have one of your own, see if someone else might be up for a guest post! (My own wonderful field has the New Chaucer Society blog, for example, as well as its brilliant newsletter,
!)
While none of these can beat a peer-reviewed publication in the eyes of academia, they make for convenient placeholders when you’ve got a great idea but you’re still working on it.
Find allies and co-conspirators
At some point in the near future, I’m going to write a PBP post on the theme of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’. I am a firm believer in the magic and power of good collaboration! And collaboration can also help you out if you’ve got a great idea but you’re still struggling to find your feet in academia. This is when it pays to seek help:
Ask a trusted mentor. I’ve written about how to hunt for a mentor here. It might turn out to be your supervisor, or someone else who’s a bit more senior in your field. Ask for a meeting, and talk about the idea you have. Do they think it has legs? If so, do they have any connections or suggestions that might help you get an early version of your idea out into the world?
Find a co-presenter/co-organizer. Maybe you’re not quite up to the task of throwing a whole conference paper together yourself, but you’d like to do something. Is there a colleague or mentor who might be willing to co-run a workshop with you based on your idea, or co-author a conference paper? Who knows? That might even end up evolving into a publication….
Find a co-author. Like I said, sometimes a co-authored conference paper or lecture can become a publication. If that’s the case, it can sometimes be an easier task to write that publication with someone else, rather than alone (sometimes).
And the best thing you can do?
If you try out one or more of the tactics above, you might not only end up protecting your idea. You just might end up doing the most effective thing you can do in these cases: FIND A CHAMPION.
Honestly, the very best thing you can have in situations like these (and in life!) is someone who believes in you, believes in your work, and who wants to help you succeed. These are the people who will keep their eyes open for opportunities for you. These are the people who will drop your name at the right moment. And these are the people who will encourage you and cheer you on until you get that idea of yours out there!
Of course, none of the above strategies are foolproof, as this little bit of drama proved last year (you can also read about it here). And just this past week,
(who wrote Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, adapted into a Netflix miniseries) announced in her newsletter that she had made the horrifying discovery that pirated versions of her book were being sold on Amazon as ‘biographies’ of her.But if you get the word out about your idea in as many different ways as possible, you’re less likely to see it become someone else’s.
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $5 per month or $50 per year), which gets you access to absolutely everything on PBP as well as access to a weekly Monday check-in Chat thread where you can receive support, encouragement, and tools for your writing!
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VB,
M
Ha, can you, please, time travel 40 years ago? Even 30 would work. Heck, 20 would work wonders. What am I saying, 10 years ago, would have saved an agonizing frustrating situation.
These, following mostly a malignant logic, ( whatever it takes and it happened to the perpetrator generally) are, in my empirical interactions, the norm in science. At least at medical and biomedical, are even expected, in order to not be labeled as " not a team player " and replaced with the next hapless desperate one.
Peer review, as it's right now, closed, it's a very poor system. Skewed and biased at best. The clamping on open peer reviews is well funded by the "established science publisher. And the established institutional stakeholders. That cultivate the clubs of peer-reviewers at the side meetings at the conferences, usually in a convivial atmosphere of a posh restaurant .
And good luck submitting without your supervisor name, head of department name and their other lifted or self plagiarized (mostly both applies) ones.
This ubiquitous system of idea and even writing appropriation, with no credit , or a thank you generic footnote is and tenure track book publishing is based on a high number of obedient ( ... or else) individuals.
Ethics are a liability.
And Kafka was an optimist.