Circulating unpublished work?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I have a rather silly question. Every once in a while, I hear that a paper has become quite popular prior to publication: the manuscript has been circulated and the work has been extensively discussed. I get that a paper becoming so popular requires a nice combination of luck and prestige in addition to a very nice paper. However, from the popular-prior-to-publication phenomenon I infer that there must be a tradition, in some philosophy circles at least, to circulate papers rather widely before publication. It just occurred to me that no one has ever sent me an unpublished work that is not the sender's own. So my question is, what are the norms for circulating papers where you work? Under what circumstances have others sent you a third person's unpublished papers? Under what circumstances would you be willing to have yours circulated, and how would you go about that?

These are excellent questions. I think the basic norms for circulating unpublished work are rooted in the author's consent. For example, suppose an author has posted the paper on their website, or on PhilPapers, or on SSRN, and so on. In all of these cases, absent some kind of disclaimer by their (such as the author writing 'Do not circulate or cite' on the paper or on their website), then I think it's fine to circulate the piece. The author has, after all, put it out there for circulation. This is very different, I think, than circulating an unpublished piece the author has sent you directly (e.g. by email). In this kind of case, I would think it wrong to circulate the unpublished work without asking. Sure, maybe the author should tell you when they send it to you, 'Please don't circulate this', but of course sometimes people can forget things like this--and the right thing to do in these cases, I think, is to play it safe out of respect for the author. For my part, I don't think I have ever once been sent an unpublished paper by anyone other than the author themselves--and my sense is that, when papers are widely circulated, they tend to be circulated either by the author or else shared widely from the author's website (where, again, the author has chosen to share them publicly).

Anyway, this is just my sense of the relevant norms, and they seem to me to be common sense. But what do you all think?

 

Comments

[almostphd]

I had the same reaction as Marcus: I would always ask the author before sharing anything unpublished, unless the author had posted it publicly already. Another thing I've wondered about (though maybe the comments are the place to ask this) is whether it can ever undermine one's efforts to publish if one shares something too widely. I'm thinking about cases where there are, say, 5-10 people out there who would be ideal referees for a paper, and if one has already shared the paper with those people, they'll have to decline referee requests and editors will have to move on to referees who aren't in quite as good a position to see why the paper should be published. Do people think this ever actually happens, and is it something authors should worry about when sharing their own unpublished work?