| I want to stress that the following question isn't motivated by any particular problem I'm facing. Indeed, since I'm a disciplinary oddball on the Conspiracy, I'm somewhat unlikely to face it (though academia is a small world and one never knows). This an attempt to stimulate some thought about norms before particular cases arise.
For purposes of academic conflict-of-interest norms, what sort of relationshio do co-bloggers have to one another? To take two relatively well-known kinds of cases: One wouldn't ordinarily ask an academic's frequent co-author to act as an impartial referee of his or her career, say, for purposes of hiring, tenure, or promotion to full professor, or for a variety of kinds of grants and fellowships. There are some collaborators who work so frequently and deeply together that a single-authored paper by one of them probably shouldn't be sent to the other for refereeing, either-- and if it is, the co-author has an obligation to at least mention the relationship to the journal's editor. This varies a little by discipline-- in fields where coauthorship is very common, it might be that the only competent referees of an article are people who've coauthored at some point with the current paper's primary author. But even in such fields, I assume one wouldn't ask a collaborator who is a co-PI on the overall study to referee a paper growing out of the study. (In some disciplines all the co-PIs on the big study get their name put on all the papers growing out of it anyways-- but this is not universal.) On the other hand, people who jointly serve on the editorial board of a journal aren't thought to have any kind of conflicts of interest just as such. Never need to be mentioned or disclosed; just not an issue. Same for peopel who've been on a conference panel together. So-- what about co-bloggers? Is this an activity that needs to be mentioned? One that disqualifies passing certain kinds of judgments? I don't even have a tentative view here. Just asking. If people e-mail me responses and thoughts (or blog them elsewhere) I'll blog 'em en masse in a couple of days. If anyone has any stories in which something like this has already come up, I can of course strip off identifying information before posting. -- Posted by Jacob Levy to The Volokh Conspiracy at 10/27/2003 04:53:54 PM Powered by Blogger Pro |
