Robin Hanson writes at the Overcoming Bias blog expressing the worry that clever ideas that appear first in blog entries will get used, without credit, by academic researchers, thus leaving the original blog posters with no credit (and, ultimately, less motivation to post interesting new ideas). I’m of two minds on this.
Yes, it would piss me off immensely to see my ideas (or even worse, my exact words) used by others without full credit.
On the other hand, ideas are cheap. I’m reminded of a quote I once saw on one of those inspirational-sayings-for-every-day desk calendars: “To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.” Thinking is the hard work, and one of the fun things about blogging is that I can set out my ideas without having to think hard about them. So, yes, if you take an idea or sentence you see here, please credit me, but if you can take it further (to the level that it can appear in a scholarly publication), you deserve full credit for that.
To put it another way: every now and then, I see a published article and think: “I had that idea 10 years ago but never got around to writing it up.” But I’m sure that often when I publish an article, various readers have the same thought.
This has more to do with ethics in science than blogs per se. People who "cheat" on a regular basis will not hesitate to take credit for a blogged idea. It seems that the definition of ethical behavior is not obvious or clear to all. E.g., in the past a couple of students have at some point or another suggested faking results to me as a solution to a technical problem in their research; I have learnt to explicitly lay out the rules at the outset (even though nobody had to lay them out for me).
Others unintentionally forget that they got the idea from a blog or wherever/whoever. For such people, the only way out is a written record with attribution. Perhaps everyone needs to keep an annotated set of idea-notes, with careful attribution, to avoid such mistakes.
This is a real issue in my current sub-field (pharmaco-epidemiology). There are a limited number of obvious methods approaches and a lot of researchers who are pursuing them. As a result, I have actually seen an idea I was developing be published as I was polishing the manuscript. Often I see conversations from which it is impossible to discuss the field without the risk of informing ideas.
I think we need to balance the ability to have discourse (because the researchers don't talk option seems to work badly where it is being tried) with the protection of ideas.
Careful research often shows the same basic approaches appear a lot and it is a real trick to even identify the first sources (as epidemiology seems highly resistant to consistent discriptors of biases and methods). Not that you should not try, but it isn't a small problem and I would like to see more ideas about solutions. Heck, I have even had trouble with people accepting being placed in the acknowledgements when we discussed the idea because they see this as "endorsing the paper" and not "crediting the idea".
Now, of course, the example given in the previous post (of fraud in data) is clearly across any line and is not an acceptable way to solve a data problem.
The devil is in the details.
I don't think the risk of poached ideas is really the issue. As academics, we regularly share ideas prior to publication (e.g. conference discussions and panels) and trust that academic integrity will, for the most part, prevent egregious intellectual shoplifting.
To my mind, the larger problem is that while blogs are a quick and effective medium for sharing and discussing ideas and research, they will continue to get underutilized by young profs so long as they aren't considered in the slightest when it comes to tenure.
While I do blog, I've often found myself cutting short or not posting what I think would be a constructive entry because I know that I really ought to get back to whatever article for publication is currently on the burner.
C. S. Peirce had this idea that ideas were real in the sense that different communities of inquirers (yes even different life forms) would eventually come to the same ideas (if they [the ideas] were good enough).
In any case its not that easy to figure out who actually had an idea first – Stigler's law of eponymy – "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."
There is something about making an idea well known that is perhaps of even more value than originally hitting upon it.
Keith