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“Author TBD”: Radical Collaboration in Contemporary Biomedical Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Rebecca Kukla
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Abstract

Ghostwriting scandals are pervasive in industry-funded biomedical research, and most responses to them have presumed that they represent a sharp transgression of the norms of scientific authorship. I argue that in fact, ghostwriting represents a continuous extension of current socially accepted authorship practices. I claim that the radically collaborative, decentralized, interdisciplinary research that forms the gold standard in medicine is in an important sense unauthored, and that this poses a serious problem in applied social epistemology. It is no easy matter to find procedural or architectural solutions that can secure epistemic trust and accountability for collaborative publishing in biomedicine.

Type
Norms of Science and Science Policy
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 845 - 858
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Many thanks to audiences at Carleton University, Queen's University, Temple University, University of South Florida, Georgetown University, and the 2010 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Montreal for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Discussions with Justin Biddle, Bryce Huebner, Sergio Sismondo, Torsten Wilholt, and especially Eric Winsberg had an enormous impact on the final form of the paper.

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