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Are marketing scientists being over-protective about bringing unfinished research in the open?
The past year, I have noticed that a lot of marketing scientists appreciate to openly discuss their field of research with marketing practicioners -- many of them even mention they want a more intense collaboration with the business arena for the sake of their own research. Vice versa, discussing marketing topics with scientists is often an eye-opening and knowledge deepening experience to me, and I hear similar voices from many colleagues. So far for the good news.
On the other hand, I have heard of scientists who wanted to blog about their on-going research in order to cross-fertilize their ideas with other people, and had been advised to remove their blog. "Some people might steal your work". "Publishing unfinished research is not scientific". And yet, there seems to be a lot of willingness to cross-fertilize ideas on unfinished research with other scientists and even practicioners, during a scientific congress or on a face-to-face basis.
So, I wonder. Are marketing scientists being overprotective in general? Or is it a matter of distrust about the unknown public who are reading blogs -- and who are potentially stealing valuable information. Or is it the uncertainty about the way information about unfinished research might be interpreted? I am very curious to read the viewpoint from the B2Bridge research members.
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I agree that it would take too much time for a scientist to start a personal blog that runs for a year or more. But why not start a blog to discuss a topic with (invited) colleagues and let the blog only last for a couple of weeks, until the discussion has brought its results?
Discussing a specific subject or theme for a few weeks can be a great use of a blog. Here the main barrier may be habit - we are still accustomed to the chaos of e-mail over the order of the social web.
(Source Graphic: Socialtext)
Other advantages of a discussion by blog:
- common archive & structured report of the discussion
- everybody works on the same information basis
- participants can join the discussion at any stage
- no 'lost e-mails'
- atomisation of the discussion - rather than sending large papers around for review, you can discuss each individual aspect
- ...
Conferences and journals represent a formal means by which ideas/views can be exchanged and work (either ongoing or complete) made public.Discussions might be triggered at conferences but other, more informal means have got to be of use to initiate and develop dialogue between interested parties. One does have to be selective in the online communities to which one subscribes and the blogs in which one participates - otherwise the risk is of being in an inappropriate network, failing to make contact with others with similar interests, and being in receipt of information which is of little value.
The real outcome of a research project at Ph.D level is not the data sets, papers, models, reports, .... The product of research is the scientists.
If research could be 'stolen' by posting a mere article about it on a blog or website, protection of intellectual property rights should not be the first concern - I would be more worried about the shallow knowledge base on which my department operates.
But I think the barrier is elsewhere. Scientific papers & recognition are the currency on which academic careers are built. As long as electronic communications and blogs are not a genuine part of this system, researchers have the wrong incentive.
Running a blog for a year could easily take up a few manweeks, up to a manmonth. This time could also be used to write a journal paper or 2 conference papers. For today's researchers, this choice is easily made.