Aetogate aftermath: paleontologists discuss the norms of their discipline.

Finally, here is the long awaited fourth part in my three part series examining the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee response to the allegations of scientific misconduct against Spencer Lucas and co-workers. Part 3 was a detailed examination of the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by this committee. In this post, I make a brief foray into the conversations paleontologists have been having online about their understanding of the accepted practices in their field.

As these conversations are ongoing (and some of them are happening on listservs to which I do not subscribe), what I present here is just a snapshot of how some members of the professional community of paleontologists (and those in related fields) describe the working rules of their professional activities and interactions. What's striking to me, though, is that these scientists are responding to the Aetogate controversy by having these conversations.

You may recall that one of the main issues at the heart of the Aetogate allegations was the question of who has the right to access specimens held in museum collections and who has the right to priority in publishing on them. The fossil specimens that serve as the data of paleontological work are scarce and fragile resources. It is not logistically possible for every paleontologist to study a particular specimen at the same time, nor even for more that a few to study that specimen in the same time frame. Moreover, the reward system in paleontology (as in other scientific fields) recognizes the achievement of the first scientist to present a particular finding, which means that sharing is at odds with getting recognition for your particular contribution to the body of scientific knowledge.

On this basis, it might be understandable if paleontologists had decided that whoever finds a fossil has exclusive rights to work on it ... except that, being a scientific discipline, paleontology also depends on the efforts of other members of the professional community to assess each other's scientific conclusions, to point out flaws in reasoning and weaknesses in conclusions, to suggest alternate interpretations, and so forth. The many eyes (and brains) of the community make for exchanges between scientists that result in more objective knowledge. In other words, unless multiple scientists consider particular specimens, the knowledge generated from those specimens will be relatively untested and thus less likely to be reliable.

Plus, just given the number of fossil specimens unearthed, if only the people who found them got to study them, some fossils would not be studied at all before their discoverers shuffled off this mortal coil.

Given the inherent tension here between the quest for individual recognition and the need for coordinated efforts from the group to scrutinize and improve the knowledge claims individuals put forward, the tribe of paleontologists needs a clear understanding of who should have access to specimens and who has a right to publish on them.

At Catalogue of Organisms, Ph.D. student Christopher Taylor lays out his understanding of the relevant norms, and of the rationale underpinning them:

While admittedly it is up to the individual institute to establish their own conditions, the general expectation is that if a museum grants permission for research to be conducted using its specimens, it is also implicitly granting permission for the researcher to publish their findings. After all, publication of research is one of the most important factors in the progress of scientific knowledge, and research that cannot be published and communicated might has well have never been conducted in the first place.

Taylor then decides to look for evidence that this understanding of the norms is on track by consulting actual loan agreements for specimens he has borrowed from museum collections:

While none commented explicitly on whether or not recipients on loans have the right to publish, one requested that:

If the work on the borrowed material is published, the borrower should either forward a reprint or indicate when and where his paper is to be published. [Emphasis in the original]

Another stated in more detail (name of institute removed by yours truly):

• Any published material that includes results based in total or in part on Museum specimens must include an acknowledgement of the Museum.
• The Museum would be grateful if the borrower could send to the relevant collection manager a copy of any paper published that cites AM specimens.

Both these sets of loan conditions only make sense if the right to publish is assumed, with the perfectly reasonable caveat that the museum in question be fully informed of any such publications.

Of course, if the museum wishes to restrict the right to publish on a particular specimen, the easiest and most unambiguous way to do so would be to restrict access to that specimen.

In a comment on Christopher Taylor's post, Kevin Padian chimes in with his understanding of these norms as a paleontologist who curates a museum collection:

I've been a curator in a paleontological museum for most of three decades and have worked in museums all over the world. An early lesson I learned is that if a specimen is in the literature, any qualified investigator should have access to it for further study. That is a responsibility of a curator. One cannot simply say that he might work on it some day, or that he once described it and therefore it is off limits.

The other side of the coin is that the requestor is responsible for being very clear about what exactly he wants to do and to get clear permission to do so. He cannot, for example, get permission to look at an undescribed specimen and then go off and describe it without permission. He cannot ask to have access to a cabinet of duckbills and then secretly look at the stegosaurs and decide to go off and publish on them. Those actions are unethical and result in bad reputations and exclusions from other collections. One should NEVER write about a specimen in a collection without explicit permission.

As Padian sees it, museums ought to grant researchers access to specimens already described in the literature. And, even if there's a reasonable presumption that researchers will want to publish their findings, researchers ought to be explicit about their intentions to write about particular specimens to which they are being granted access. This way, there's no room for confusion, and both parties are clear about the agreement they're undertaking.

(It's worth noting that Padian alludes to a strategy at the professional community's disposal for enforcing good behavior and punishing bad actors: the ability to restrict a researcher's access to a collection. If a researcher has gained a bad reputation by violating a curator's trust, that can be communicated to curators of other collections and presumably would count as a strike against one's status as a "qualified investigator".)

On another issue that was important in some of the allegations against Lucas et al., Padian shares his view of who in the community of paleontologists ought to be able to access, and publish on, specimens whose proper taxonomic assignment may be a source of scientific debate:

[I]f a specimen has been named and described, it should be available to all qualified investigators. They have to be able to check the features, characters and so on that you have published. And yes, they can include it in their phylogenetic analyses once it's published. And no, they don't have to ask your permission to do their own phylogeny, or even to determine that your identification or systematic placement was wrong.

This seems to fit right in to the organized skepticism that communities of scientists are supposed to exercise to improve the body of knowledge they are building together.

It's worth noting here that Taylor's understanding of the norms and Padian's understanding of the norms are not identical here, though they are not very far from each other, either. But what's important is that they are going to the trouble to articulate the norms as they understand them, and to engage in a bona fide discussion with others who may have a different understanding. This illuminates the common ground and identifies issues about which reasonable members of a field may have different working assumptions -- which is reason enough to make those assumptions explicit. In the absence of a formal and exhaustive rule book, how else are members of the professional community going to be on the same page?

Being transparent about your intentions and expectations is one way to identify the norms within your field that guide your practice and that you expect should guide the practice of your fellow scientists. Asking questions of other practitioners, and of bodies that train practitioners and govern professional activities, is another. Jonathan R. Wagner identifies an area where the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee decision on the Aetogate allegations seems not to fit with his own understanding of disciplinary norms -- and requests clarification:

I have always believed that the statement that "taxon X needs a new name" (as in William Parker's case) clearly establishes intent to provide a name at a later date. Indeed, such statements are always followed soon thereafter by a new name from the same author(s). In cases where another author was expected to provide a name, this is phrased "to be assigned a new name by author Y." No one I know thinks that this is ever meant to open the floor for naming by other workers. Why would you invite others to take credit for your observation? It would be helpful to know if the EEC accepts this as common practice, and, since they clearly feel it was insufficient here, if they could recommend more appropriate wording.

As Wagner's questions suggest, norms of practice are actually meant to help scientists get their work done in a way that doesn't just benefit them individually but also benefits the community of scientific practitioners collectively. They are not arbitrary rules. They should make sense. In cases where different scientists in the community seem to be making different assumptions about the right way to deal with a certain situation, there is a worthwhile discussion to have about whether one set of assumptions makes more sense than the other. (Possibly different assumptions could be on equal footing here, although the recognition of this fact should make scientists aware of the importance of making their own assumptions explicit.) The discussion may establish common ground that everyone in the community can endorse. On the other hand, it may identify a need for the community to examine the question more thoroughly to come to a position the community can endorse. Either way, a real discussion -- one that includes questions and serious responses -- makes the community's shared values more intelligible, and reduces the possibility that members of community will depart from these values because they didn't realize that the community had these shared norms in the first place.

Indeed, it seems like communicating explicitly about accepted (and expected) practices should be happening routinely within scientific communities. If it were part of the fabric of the day-to-day life of the scientists, though, you'd expect that many of the problems alleged in Aetogate would have been avoided. Writing at Highly Allochthonous, geologist Chris Rowan notes:

The code of 'best practice' that they [the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee] have come up with includes a lengthy consideration of the interactions between museums and visiting researchers with respect to curated material, emphasising the need for explicit communication regarding intentions and access policies.

Many of these suggestions seem to fall into the category of 'bleedingly obvious', but if this case hasn't made it crystal clear exactly why even the bleedingly obvious should be explicitly stated, I don't know what will. Whatever combination of oversight, miscommunication, ego and less-than-honourable intentions actually led to the Aetogate saga, one has to concede that blithely assuming that everyone is following the same implicit rule book is just asking for trouble - in this case, very public trouble which has been damaging for all concerned, including the wider scientific community. Next time, they'll be no excuses

And here, the public nature of the present trouble may well mobilize paleontologists to have the conversations needed to make the rules and aspirations they hope will guide their scientific practice as a field more explicit. At The Ethical Palaeontologist, Julia Heathcoate reminds us that the same technologies that permit rapid dissemination of scientific findings can also be used to help individual paleontologist function as a community:

This is uncharted territory for the [SVP] Ethics Committee. But at some point in an institution's life everything is new and untested. This is the first public case I am aware of in palaeontology. It has been alluded to that there were earlier cases, whether investigated or not, of alleged plagiarism. I think it is certainly much easier to pick up on such breaches now the entire world is connected via the internet. Twenty years ago, there would not have been a British palaeontologist condensing and organising all the material for the American students' case. The Polish students may not have read the paper on their specimens until some time after its publication. Look back to the February 1994 archive of the D[inosaur] M[ailing] L[ist] and see that there were only a handful of e-mails per day. Compare that to the February 2004 archive.

Every paleontologist who has an interest in the quality of the scientific knowledge his or her community works to build also has an interest in the smooth functioning of the scientific community whose members build the knowledge. The conduct of individual paleontologists in building knowledge, and in interacting with others in ways that help or hinder their efforts to build knowledge, is the business of the whole community. That community, therefore, needs to be clear about norms of practice, finding enough agreement that its members can work effectively with each other, identifying and striving to resolve ambiguities and disagreements, and creating a professional environment where discussions of the norms are so routine that everyone in the community can be counted on to know what they are.

Better than that, if a community of scientists routinely engages in discussions about the norms that guide their practice, every member of that community has the potential -- maybe even the responsibility -- to help shape those norms as the community moves forward.