One of the reasons I became quite invested in the #Receptiogate saga*, even before its full popcorn-munching bizarreness became fully apparent, was the phrase used in the initial response of Carla Rossi’s (quite possibly fictional) secretary to Peter Kidd’s initial enquiries about the unaccredited use of images and commentary from his blog: “I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!”(1)
As regular readers will know all too well, I spend quite a lot of time agonising over whether the time I invest in writing stuff here is worthwhile, and one of the justifications is that it does give me the chance to explore ideas that either I’ve not got enough time to develop into full-blown articles, or that may become serious publications in future but I want to get initial thoughts jotted down now, or that look too limited for proper publication but nevertheless are worth noting. But in all these instances they are original and, I hope, credible ideas, and the idea that, because they are posted on a blog rather than published in a journal, they are basically valueless is infuriating.
Indeed “it can happen that the information [on blogs] provided is scientifically unreliable”, as Rossi noted in one of her various academic.edu self-defences (2). That’s certainly true, but one can say the same about any number of peer-reviewed (or ‘peer reviewed’) publications. If blogs are so lightweight and ephemeral, why would any serious researcher risk drawing on them, whether or not they attribute it to the original author? The answer, of course, is that this has nothing to do with the quality of the contents but is all about the branding. In Rossi’s view, it seems, blogs are fair game because they lack the imprimatur of a publishing house or journal, the accoutrements of a DOI and an ISSN or ISBN. This suggests a powerful commitment to what we might call academic credentialism: the name of the journal or the publisher, not the name of the author and certainly not the research itself, is the guarantee of scientific seriousness and quality.
The implication is that, if I were to give this site a nice new header, recruit a few friends and family pets as an advisory board, and present it as a journal or a publishing house, rather than just ‘Neville’s blog’, everything published here would miraculously acquire scientific weight, even if the only actual peer review involved was my own. (I have, incidentally, looked up the FAQs on DOIs, and it would be perfectly straightforward to get them for my blog posts, if I could be bothered…).
To be fair to Rossi, her position here seems to be entirely without hypocrisy. In her response to the latest alleged discoveries of plagiarised text in an article she wrote for the publication ENERGIE9 (editor-in-chief: C. Rossi): “ENERGIE9 n’était guère plus qu’un blog sur l’art et la littérature” – it was “little more than a blog on art and literature”, so it is a ridiculous waste of time to expend effort scrutinising anything published in it (3, 4). All blogs, even her own, lack any scientific status, and are therefore outwith all the norms of scientific discourse. Those of us who do adhere to basic scientific principles in writing blog posts – granted, sometimes with a rather more relaxed discursive style – are simply making a category error.
As various people have noted – I was struck by comments by @Calthalas, but I don’t think he was the only one – the whole Receptio affair raises wider questions about different aspects of contemporary academia, including the economics of open access publishing and the cut-throat world of competition for grants. Bizarre claims that plagiarism isn’t plagiarism unless it actually contravenes laws on copyright aside, the Rossi view on the status of blog posts, that they are in no way ‘proper research’, does in fact echo some well-entrenched attitudes.
Much as I might wish to submit my blog posts or a selection of them as a body of work to REF or to a salary review committee – I’ll readily grant that no individual post is substantial enough on its own – they are regarded not as credible outputs but as a form of outreach and dissemination, or personal indulgence. Most people would not take this as grounds for simply lifting the ideas without acknowledgement – but they might well hesitate before citing them in their current form. Whereas ‘pers. comm.’ is hallowed by tradition as a legitimate form of reference…
Obviously I find this annoying. No, my posts are not peer reviewed; the quality control here is my own sense of what might damage my reputation, and the credibility of any given piece rests on the intrinsic merits of the argument, and perhaps on my own standing in the discipline. But however much different review bodies claim that they consider everything on its own merits rather than focusing on journal prestige or publisher, this doesn’t seem to extend to self-published material (unless, maybe, you become your own publisher…).
#Receptiogate has, of course, been a very online thing, from Rossi’s Wayback Machine research method to Peter Kidd’s blog to the reverse image search for alleged members of the centre and its premises to the exchange of findings and the activities of Sokpops on Twitter. It makes sense that Very Online people would be outraged by such behaviour – but maybe there are others out there thinking, well, plagiarism is bad, obviously, but it was only a blog, not a proper publication, so why are they making such a fuss..?
* See https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html and subsequent posts, and the ongoing conversations on Twitter around @mssprovenance, @jpeterburger and @paularcurtis on the Twitter.
Update 27/1: I am delighted and honoured to have received an email purporting to be a Roman law firm acting on behalf of Prof.ssa Rossi, demanding that I reveal the source of the personal data included in this blog post, and delete it forthwith under various clauses of GDPR. Yes… That would be the personal data of her own words from various academia.edu posts, albeit some of them now deleted, and the publicly available information that she is/was the editor of ENERGIE9. I mean, really? Apparently a few people have got these today. Clearly the Streisand Effect doesn’t translate into Italian.
This has been a cheering end to a pretty exhausting week; I feel as if I have been elected to membership of a distinguished scholarly society. Not that one should wish to encourage more people to write blogs about this affair, but I really think we should have a t-shirt. Or at least a badge. And a ten-year anniversary reunion.
Update 31/1: the correspondence continues, with ever more threatening insistence that I must reveal the sources of the personal data, the method used for collection etc., and, while this is very very silly, suggesting an extremely shaky grasp of GDPR (let alone the journalism exemption), it’s no skin off my nose to provide the relevant links here…
- Quotation from email from Prof.ssa Rossi’s secretary to Peter Kidd, quoted on the latter’s blog at https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html
- Quotation from Prof.ssa Rossi: “it can happen that the information [on blogs] provided is scientifically unreliable”. Source: document entitled ‘Alleged Plagiarism’, posted by Prof.ssa Rossi on 25/12/22, https://www.academia.edu/93663003/Alleged_Plagiarism; now apparently deleted, but can be viewed using the Wayback Machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/20221225200812/https://www.academia.edu/93663003/Alleged_Plagiarism
- That Prof.ssa Rossi is or was the editor-in-chief of ENERGIE9: established via Google search, e.g.: https://www.academia.edu/33533370/La_notion_d_Integumentum_dans_la_poésie_de_Michel_Ange [cover page of offprint]; https://uzh.academia.edu/ENERGIENOVE; https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/146186/
- Quotation from Prof.ssa Rossi: “ENERGIE9 n’était guère plus qu’un blog sur l’art et la littérature”. Source: document entitled ‘ENERGIE9 Notion’, posted by Prof.ssa Rossi on 14/1/23, www.academia.edu/94938549/ENERGIE9_NOTION; now deleted but can be viewed using the Wayback Machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230114113427/https://www.academia.edu/94938549/ENERGIE9_NOTION
The thing about the question “do blogs have value as a venue for research” is that, as you say, one can’t have it both ways. If they are legitimate research, then duplicating their contents without citation is plagiarism. If they aren’t, then duplicating their contents (with or without citation) is the promulgation of material not worthy of publication. Either way Rossi would be in the wrong here, so her defense is pretty weak.
(There is a third possible interaction between blogs and research, irrelevant to this particular case but worth mentioning with regard to the social sciences: blogs could be regarded as a meaningful subject of research and not research in their own right, in subjects such as linguistics or sociology. In that scenario, too, citation would be standard professional practice.)
Yes, I was being sarcastic in suggesting that Rossi’s position was without hypocrisy… Obviously one cannot see inside someone’s head; my guess would be that there is, it was, a genuine belief that blogs aren’t ‘real’ scholarship; not that they are therefore unreliable, but rather – like auction catalogues, to which I believe she did compare them at one point- they are merely convenient sources of information over which they have no proprietorial right, rather than containing the sort of academic insights which one should indeed reference properly.
The mystic phrase “blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil” and its application to the present case has had me wondering from the start of all this.
It cannot mean that things published in blogs have no value whatsoever, and so nobody would go about stealing them, ERGO Rossi did not steal them.
Could it possibly mean that thing published in blogs have no value whatsoever, and so appropriating them does not constitute theft? If so, it’s lucky for Rossi that she has a lawyer to advise her on this point.
Although another curious, or downright bizarre, thing is that one of Rossi’s replies on academic dot edu spent a lot of time talking about the law around copyright, to demonstrate that her work had not broken it – whereas plagiarism is an academic offence, and doesn’t magically disappear if you show that you have taken only x% without attributing it.