This dissonance reminds me that the modes of “plagiarism” we worry about now really incorporate challenges to at least three kinds of authorial claims, which the history of print as a form has bound together but which are not identical with each other.

– the obligation when representing someone else’s ideas to represent them accurately
– intellectual property rights to print, distribute, license
– rights of attribution (sometimes under the umbrella of “moral rights” of authors)

In a reputation economy, it matters what scholarship — what words — your name is attached to. In a dynamic publishing environment where reputation is an important currency, one might imagine some acts of scholarship where one wishes group attributions, some where one simply contributes content in the interests of a greater good (wiki style white-papers on specific topics, say) and some where one wishes ones own contributions acknowledged. It is easy to slide across these territories without recognizing that one has done so, and that is becoming as true of conventional publishing today as it is of online publishing. For example, the emergent practice of “custom publishing” is trending towards online publishing in tolerating that instability. Custom publishing arrangements allow an instructor to pick and choose from a publisher’s content list, perhaps even at the level of paragraphs, perhaps combining her own original materials with materials the publisher owns)  These arrangements are far from centralized for all publishers; in many cases, no content-area editor oversees them. So if you publish scholarship with the provision that it may be used in “custom publishing” you are entertaining this possibility: another instructor might select a few pages (which may or may not accurately represent your thinking), add her own writing to them, and publish that with your name on it, with your name and hers together, or only your name on it. This is a limit-case, perhaps. Is it one we would be right to be concerned about?

I think KF’s study is particularly sound in the ways it ask what is *enabling* of intellectual discourse in our traditional models, as well as what’s inhibiting of it. The moral right of attribution is enabling, I think, in that it populates the community of knowledge with textual persons that one can be in conversation with over time and space.

And even that careerist point can be uncompelling — at least I’ve found it so. Speaking personally, I’ve found it to be a vicious circle: I need to publish in order to get an academic job, but I don’t see the point of writing academic pieces if I don’t have an academic job. And yet I have done some publishing, though not a deluge: I published a couple of articles in okay journals before I went on the job market, didn’t get a job, spent a couple of years trying to get my dissertation published as a book with editors telling me that it was great work but wouldn’t sell, didn’t get a job, gave up on trying to get my dissertation published as a book, turned a dissertation chapter into an article that was accepted by a truly major journal in my field, was shocked to learn that said article wouldn’t be published for nearly three years, didn’t get a job, didn’t get a job, didn’t get a job. Any steam I originally had when it comes to academic writing continues to hiss thinly away.