The Commodification Of Information
International Conference, May 30-31, 1999, Faculty of Law, Haifa University

Day 2 - Morning Panel II - 11:30-13:00

The Puzzle of Priority: Devising New Norms and Conventions in Research for the Context of Electronic Publication

Helen Nissenbaum (Princeton University)

The prospect of ubiquitous electronic publication, communication and collaboration promises great advantage to the realm scientific research. At the same time, however, it poses challenges to some of the norms, conventions and institutions that have governed its practices.

This paper addresses the question of how we ought to devise new norms and conventions for an environment dominated by the new medium. It recommends that before adopting new norms and conventions we should submit them to a test that would evaluate whether proposed new norms for the electronic era are likely to serve values, ends, and purposes of scientific research at least as well as they are served by the entrenched norms and conventions of the traditional non-electronic environment. The paper illustrates the way the test might operate on the case of priority for scientific discovery, where electronic publication poses a particularly interesting puzzle for existing norms and conventions. It suggest that a framework of intellectual property would not meet the standard of the test as a possible substitute for entrenched norms of attributing priority.