Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal communication channels

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

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.