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‘Protecting ownership’ of a big idea?

In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How does one protect ownership of a potentially big idea?

How realistic is a fear that someone in the peer-review process will sabotage a paper and steal its idea if they think it is potentially a big idea?

I'm not sure about the peer-review process per se, but I think fears of idea theft aren't necessarily unrealistic or unfounded. I've not only had a few sketchy things happen to me in my career and known other people (including well-known senior people) who've reported similar things. There are also quite a few cases in intellectual history where people took other people's ideas and ran with them. One example is David Hilbert inviting Einstein to give lectures on general relativity at the University of Göttingen (while staying at Hilbert's house!) before Hilbert immediately tried to write and publish a paper to beat Einstein to the field equations. Not that any of us are the next Einstein or whatever, but the point is, there may be people out there who either take big ideas and run with them, either knowing that it's untoward behavior or (for whatever reason) thinking it's just fine to do.

Have other people found this to be a legitimate problem? And are there any ways to protect oneself against it? 

Personally, I've simply tried not to worry about it and simply get on with my work. But, in other fields such as Math and Physics, my understanding is that this is sort of what the ArXiv functions as–a place where one can post preprints to 'establish priority' as it were. Of course, we have something similar in philosophy (the PhilArchive), but I'm not sure that professional norms treat it the same way. What do readers think?

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6 responses to “‘Protecting ownership’ of a big idea?”

  1. converger

    I think the worry of being scooped in philosophy is generally ungrounded. If you have had your paper out there – presented it at conferences – then you will have some sort of documentation to support any claim of being scooped. But people do cluster around similar ideas … I have had that experience before. You work closely with people – read their work and chat at conferences – your ideas and the way you express them are bound to converge. So others will be defending similar ideas … almost inevitably. (read R K Merton on multiple discoveries … they are, in some sense, the norm).

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  2. William Peden

    “One example is David Hilbert inviting Einstein to give lectures on general relativity at the University of Göttingen (while staying at Hilbert’s house!) before Hilbert immediately tried to write and publish a paper to beat Einstein to the field equations.”
    He should have stayed at Hilbert’s hotel.
    In my experience, this has never happened. More often, I have come up with what I thought was an article-worthy idea, only to find out that someone in my field expressed the valuable nugget in a footnote in a paper 10+ years prior.
    Also, I think that originality is fairly low in importance for determining whether an article gets accepted (as opposed to development, fashion, referee agendas etc.) so just obtaining an original idea is not very useful for a thief.

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  3. Am

    this happens in the peer review process. i know someone whom it has happened to. coincidences, and false accusations on their basis, also happen. i used to cagey about sharing my ideas. the best policy is to just not worry about it. over the course of your career you will be happier if you share and submit ideas freely and don’t guard them. the increased risk that something will be stolen from you is far outweighed by the benefit of having a more carefree and collaborative philosophical life.

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  4. Barquan Markus

    I think peer review is an unlikely place for it to happen, for a lot of reasons, not least that the referees don’t know who you are and whether your association with the idea won’t get out before they can steal it.
    But don’t let anyone tell you scooping doesn’t happen in philosophy, or not in an impactful way. I’ve seen it several times. I’ve seen people lose what would have been influential publications because of it. The scooper isn’t always malicious; sometimes they just like an idea and start to feel like it’s their own. Or they think you don’t plan to publish it anyway because it’s not your main area. But the damage is real.
    This should be obvious. If you’re tackling a longstanding problem — why does X cause Y; how could X be Y; What explains how X and phi, given the problems with all the putative explanations — and you come up with a clear, precise solution, which addresses prior problems in a way that currently known options don’t, then OF COURSE it loses value if someone else publishes it first. This WILL be a ground to reject it in peer-review. I can’t fathom why anyone doubts this.
    That said, this gig just isn’t worth it if you spend your time guarding against scooping, however real (I’m insisting) it is. If you don’t share your ideas at workshop, conferences, coffee shops, hallways, it’s not the life you signed up for.
    So the best approach, I think, is, first, don’t sit on an idea for too long. Get it out there. And, echoing Justin, try to semi-publicize your ideas as much as possible, so it’s known as yours or at least recorded as such. Post it on your website, Phil Papers, etc. Workshop it at conferences. Give it catchy names and nicknames. And hope for the best.

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  5. Assistant Professor

    I agree with others that getting your ideas published and promoting them is the best we can do here. My experience is that this can be a real risk, but also one that is hard to mitigate. I have a paper on a somewhat novel idea and a peer reviewer did identify me as the author (based on previous conferencing on the topic), disclosed to me that they made this connection, and then has published on the topic (without citing my work!) apparently taking themselves to be an authority on the topic by virtue of having been asked to peer review the original paper (again, on a something that wasn’t in the literature before, so no reviewer was already an ‘expert’ on the topic).
    Alas, it is a mostly petty grievance, though a real one. The problem as I’ve seen it is less with people being influenced by the work of others (how great to be influential!) as it is with not giving appropriate credit/citation to that influence, especially when the very norms of scholarship are to cite sources and the norms of academia are (perhaps overly) focused on metrics regarding impact/citations.

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  6. Jakub

    I believe people often overestimate the originality of their ideas. I had a related experience during a graduate seminar when a visiting PhD student was hesitant to discuss their project because they feared someone would steal their ideas. I found this attitude unreasonable and asked the student to leave the seminar.

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