RE: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal communication channels

["Toth, Joe" <jtoth@middlebury.edu>]

Phil's observation hardly rambles--and departures from the 
pedestrian are prized by a list-lurker like me. My thanks for the 
offering.

Garvey and Griffith offer a sharp reminder of the organizing 
power of a discipline, which is designed to structure 
consideration by vetting observations, assertions, conclusions, 
and other claims to truth in accredited ways: through refereed 
journal publishing; holding conferences and symposia; 
promulgating standards, guidelines and best practices; and so on.

But the more I think of this excerpt, the more it smacks of tory 
history in its willingness to label only as "judicious" a process 
that at times may also be arbitrary, retrograde, or 
discriminatory. Leslie White was right when he said that "science 
is 'sciencing'", and my less than original point is that the 
"institution of science" amounts to a bunch of people engaging in 
a wide variety of practices related to what we might call 
scientific enquiry motivated by desires to solve problems, make 
money, safeguard truth, investigate the unknown, and so forth 
into the sustained and varied drive of the ego. Converting 
informal information into formal knowledge certainly is a long 
process, but in this bazaar of activities, it probably is not as 
judicious as Garvey and Griffith think it is.

And to Phil's question about keeping separate formal and informal 
communication processes, perhaps the issue is more about 
establishing a continuum of work products for practitioners for 
them to ascribe value to what they encounter. I mean, has the 
enterprise of physics or economics been hurt or helped by the 
speedy transmission of informal information through e-mail, 
e-print servers, and institutional repositories? And has the 
presence of both sanctioned/published and unsanctioned/pre-pub 
materials in an IR really begun to dismantle science's walls of 
rigor?

--Joe Toth
Middlebury College

-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 9:22 PM
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Subject: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal communication channels

In the early 1970s, the American Psychological Association 
entrusted two psychologists, William D. Garvey and Belver C. 
Griffith to make sense of the "crisis in scholarly 
communication."  In doing so, they embarked on research to first 
better understand the communication processes of researchers -- 
both the *informal* where most of the communication among peers 
is done, and the *formal* which describes the traditional journal 
and book publication process.

In one of their first published reports [1], the psychologists 
warn about formalizing the informal communication channels. They 
write,

"accelerating the flow of scientific information in the informal 
domain and expanding its dissemination is a problem precisely 
because it occurs in systems that obscure the boundary between 
the informal and formal domains. This boundary is one that 
science has deliberately erected to curtail, temporarily, the 
flow of information until the information has been examined 
against the current state of knowledge in a discipline. 
Non-scientists view procedure of curtailment as 
ultra-conservative; experienced, practicing scientists perceive 
it as the essential feature of science....The long judicious 
procedure by which this conversion is made is unique to science. 
To reorganize it for the sake of speed, or for open communication 
with other spheres of intellectual endeavor, would almost 
certainly dismantle the institution of science as we know it 
today." (p.362)

Manuscript depositing mandates (e.g. Harvard, NIH, etc.) could be 
seen as essentially formalizing the informal. Most of the 
discussion surrounding the debates have been on immediate effects 
(the time and resources devoted to archiving, the mechanisms 
required to streamline the process). Little has been devoted to 
possible unintended consequences of such mandates. Unintended 
consequences are not necessarily negative [2], and I don't want 
to imply that I'm implying an argument against institutional 
archiving. Still, is there reason to argue (like Garvey and 
Griffith) that we should strive to keep the informal and formal 
communication processes separate?

--Phil Davis

[If these graduate student ramblings are tiresome, I'm happy to
return to more pedestrian dialogs].

[1] Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1971). Scientific
communication: Its role in the conduct of research and creation
of knowledge. American Psychologist, 26(4), 350-362.

[2] Merton, R. K. (1936). The Unanticipated Consequences of
Purposive Social Action. American Sociological Review, 1(6),
894-904.