Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T02:11:22.302Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Communism and the Incentive to Share in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Remco Heesen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The communist norm requires that scientists widely share the results of their work. Where did this norm come from, and how does it persist? I argue on the basis of a game-theoretic model that rational credit-maximizing scientists will in many cases conform to the norm. This means that the origins and persistence of the communist norm can be explained even in the absence of a social contract or enforcement, contrary to recent work by Michael Strevens but adding to previous work emphasizing the benefits of the incentive structure created by the priority rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 698 - 716
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Thanks to Kevin Zollman, Michael Strevens, Jan Sprenger, Teddy Seidenfeld, Stephan Hartmann, Lee Elkin, Liam Bright, Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Carl Bergstrom, Arif Ahmed, two anonymous referees, and audiences at the Bristol-Groningen Conference in Formal Epistemology, the Logic Colloquium in Helsinki, and EPSA15 in Düsseldorf for valuable comments and discussion. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SES 1254291 and by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust.

References

Arzberger, Peter, Schroeder, Peter, Beaulieu, Anne, Bowker, Geof, Casey, Kathleen, Laaksonen, Leif, Moorman, David, Uhlir, Paul, and Wouters, Paul. 2004. “Promoting Access to Public Research Data for Scientific, Economic, and Social Development.” Data Science Journal 3:135–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aspect, Alain, Dalibard, Jean, and Roger, Gérard. 1982. “Experimental Test of Bell’s Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers.” Physical Review Letters 49 (25): 1804–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banerjee, Siddhartha, Goel, Ashish, and Krishnaswamy, Anilesh Kollagunta. 2014. “Re-incentivizing Discovery: Mechanisms for Partial-Progress Sharing in Research.” In Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 149–66. New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Bicchieri, Cristina. 1988. “Methodological Rules as Conventions.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (4): 477–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bicchieri, Cristina 2006. The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Borgman, Christine L. 2012. “The Conundrum of Sharing Research Data.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63 (6): 1059–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyer, Thomas. 2014. “Is a Bird in the Hand Worth Two in the Bush? Or, Whether Scientists Should Publish Intermediate Results.” Synthese 191 (1): 17–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyer-Kassem, Thomas, and Imbert, Cyrille. 2015. “Scientific Collaboration: Do Two Heads Need to Be More than Twice Better than One?” Philosophy of Science 82 (4): 667–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dasgupta, Partha, and David, Paul A.. 1994. “Toward a New Economics of Science.” Research Policy 23 (5): 487–521.Google Scholar
Goring, Simon J., Weathers, Kathleen C., Dodds, Walter K., Soranno, Patricia A., Sweet, Lynn C., Cheruvelil, Kendra S., Kominoski, John S., Rüegg, Janine, Thorn, Alexandra M., and Utz, Ryan M.. 2014. “Improving the Culture of Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Ecology by Expanding Measures of Success.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (1): 39–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heesen, Remco. 2017. “The Incentive to Share in the Intermediate Results Game.” Technical report, PhilSci Archive, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/13321/.Google Scholar
Huber, John C. 1998a. “Invention and Inventivity as a Special Kind of Creativity, with Implications for General Creativity.” Journal of Creative Behavior 32 (1): 58–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John C. 1998b. “Invention and Inventivity Is a Random, Poisson Process: A Potential Guide to Analysis of General Creativity.” Creativity Research Journal 11 (3): 231–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John C. 2001. “A New Method for Analyzing Scientific Productivity.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (13): 1089–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John C., and Wagner-Döbler, Roland. 2001a. “Scientific Production: A Statistical Analysis of Authors in Mathematical Logic.” Scientometrics 50 (2): 323–37.Google Scholar
Huber, John C., and Wagner-Döbler, Roland 2001b. “Scientific Production: A Statistical Analysis of Authors in Physics, 1800–1900.” Scientometrics 50 (3): 437–53.Google Scholar
Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttegger, Simon M., Skyrms, Brian, and Zollman, Kevin J. S.. 2014. “Probe and Adjust in Information Transfer Games.” Erkenntnis 79 (4): 835–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, Philip. 1990. “The Division of Cognitive Labor.” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1): 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno, and Woolgar, Steve. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Louis, Karen Seashore, Jones, Lisa M., and Campbell, Eric G.. 2002. “Macroscope: Sharing in Science.” American Scientist 90 (4): 304–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macfarlane, Bruce, and Cheng, Ming. 2008. “Communism, Universalism and Disinterestedness: Re-examining Contemporary Support among Academics for Merton’s Scientific Norms.” Journal of Academic Ethics 6 (1): 67–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1942. “A Note on Science and Democracy.” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1–2): 115–26.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1957. “Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science.” American Sociological Review 22 (6): 635–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1961. “Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105 (5): 470–86.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1969. “Behavior Patterns of Scientists.” American Scholar 38 (2): 197–225.Google Scholar
Norris, James R. 1998. Markov Chains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Piwowar, Heather. 2013. “Altmetrics: Value All Research Products.” Nature 493 (7431): 159.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Resnik, David B. 2006. “Openness versus Secrecy in Scientific Research.” Episteme 2 (3): 135–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Soranno, Patricia A., Cheruvelil, Kendra S., Elliott, Kevin C., and Montgomery, Georgina M.. 2015. “It’s Good to Share: Why Environmental Scientists’ Ethics Are out of Date.” BioScience 65 (1): 69–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strevens, Michael. 2003. “The Role of the Priority Rule in Science.” Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 55–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strevens, Michael 2017. “Scientific Sharing: Communism and the Social Contract.” In Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge, ed. Boyer-Kassem, Thomas, Mayo-Wilson, Conor, and Weisberg, Michael, chap. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tenopir, Carol, Allard, Suzie, Douglass, Kimberly, Aydinoglu, Arsev Umur, Wu, Lei, Read, Eleanor, Manoff, Maribeth, and Frame, Mike. 2011. “Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions.” PLoS ONE 6 (6): e21101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zuckerman, Harriet, and Merton, Robert K.. 1971. “Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalisation, Structure and Functions of the Referee System.” Minerva 9 (1): 66–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Heesen supplementary material

Heesen supplementary material

Download Heesen supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 472.9 KB