The Voynich Ninja

With (free, easy & unlimited) membership access to archive.org one can also submit snapshpots of whole or partial websites and of single files, which serves a documentary as well as a longterm storage purpose.

A downloadable PDF file following scientific form (containing a prior work paragraph listing extensively what you are building upon, citations, references, bibliography, etc.)  certainly seems the best choice for publication of original research.

When quoting from or referring to websites (weblogs, online articles, wikipedia), try to use retrievals from archive.org instead of direct URLs. This will (kind of) circumvent the academic antipathy towards the volatile nature of the www.

Be sure to chose an appropriate license for your work, not only the publication, but also text & images (created by you, like figures) on your weblog or website. This seems essential for two reasons:

a) Protection of your work. I've seen a notion of uncertainty also here on the forum that publishing would automatically open one's research for plagiarism. This isn't so. License your work, be happy.

b) Certainty for other researchers how to be able to use your work. You WANT to be quoted, properly, it seems.

Choosing a license does not cost any money, you don't need to register a trademark or consider a patent (mind you!), simply choose one of the many, many licensing models available that suits your purpose and distribute it together with your work. The legal impact is such that you won't have problems to protect your rights in case of a dispute. A highly successful licensing model I'd like to suggest is CreativeCommons, especially for beginners, as it offers assistance in defining fine-grained licensing needs.

Also be sure the licensing of any digital material (licenses for tangible goods are different) you are using in your work allows for re-publication, and in case the license is different from the on you have chosen for your work, be sure to mention it in the credits. I'd like to stress this point, because a reciprocal concern towards the rights of others seems rather absent at large, on this forum & elsewhere, when posting images & figures.

Should you really be concerned about plagiarism or worse, even theft, create a checksum for your publication files and distribute it together with them. It represents a digital authenticity stamp.


IN CASE you are just happily blogging away, stay calm and forget about all that, besides being nice & following the netiquette. Mention where you read stuff, provide links. You are not moving the earth when hitting the "publish" button.

The "damn my eyes, someone else saw it first" game going on here is not only tiring, but also largely ridiculous and does not seem to further the cause, at all. Any scholar suffering from "voynich angst" will find affirmation for all fears, here, for sure.

Personally I've made it a custom to always look up M.E.D'Imperio's Elegant Enigma first. I rarely get disappointed, as again in the case of "platform roots", recently, but disappointingly she, or the people she properly credits, receive credit very rarely only.

Addendum: The rssing copy should not be of too much concern, that's just something that happens to a lot of popular (yay!) sites: traffic diversion (traffic = adclicks = revenue). It can be prevented by restricting access to rss feeds, which seems to be the case, by now. But since the forum is not dependand on ads for funding it does not seem to do a lot of harm. In a certain sense it helps to attract more readers.

I'll take the <ot> blame: It seems really easy to disagree with Rich SantaColoma. From personal experience, it is much harder to agree with him!


Yet, in the end it is not at all hard to recognise Rich's integrity.

</ot>

There are two ways to look at this. If the question is 'who gets the prize for having stumbled on this first?' as is somewhat the case in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. parallel, then I agree that the question is not that important. Though I would still note, even in a blog, where I read the information. 

Now if it's about a developed idea, things are different. People used to academic writing will want to know where this idea came from. Who launched it and what were their arguments? What precisely did they say? How did they come to this conclusion? 

Normally these things are easy to trace through a well developed aparatus of references, citations, footnotes... but this is missing in Voynich studies. I don't blame people for this though. It is a consequence of the fact that we have the habit of writing on websites, forums and blogs. People just want to tell their story and they don't want to be slowed down by that kind of stuff. 

When I write a blog post I want to tell a story, I want it to be a pleasant read. That is why I'm looking for the middle way by adding all the reference stuff in footnotes. With only moderate success, apparently 

The whole essence of this discussion is, that people used to academic writing are fully aware that what we are talking about here:

• forum discussions
  
• blog posts
  

have nothing to do with academic writing.
Forum discussions are free exchanges of ideas and opinions. They live from the fact that different people contribute different parts.
Blog posts are expressions of free thought, which have undergone no review whatsoever.

Academic publications are not first discussed openly. Parts of them (presentations of progress) may be presented at dedicated meetings (symposia), which may provide valuable feedback.
Draft papers are submitted for review, and handed out only to a select few, who shall not disclose the contents.
After a positive review, the paper is published, has a date and basically a 'quality stamp'.

(This is in the interest both of the authors and the publisher. The publisher has the aim to sell the result and on the one hand requires quality and on the other hand usually does not want to see the material already generally known through the internet).

Just as an example, the discussion about the oak and ivy figure is a discussion about an observation.
This is not an academic result. It is the point where the work starts.

Nobody cares who saw it first.
That is not *at all* an academic discussion that requires citation. In Voynich MS discussion fora it may be highly interesting, but at an academic level it is trivia. Especially since all pictures are freely available to the whole world.

Papers that only include hypotheses, speculation and no conclusion will never be accepted as academic papers. They are perfectly fine for blog posts.
If they do mention conclusions, one of the main points for peer review is to verify that the conclusions are sufficiently supported by the analysis that is presented. Nobody makes this check in blog posts.

It is indeed a good idea to distinguish between various formats of publication. Just to be clear, I want people on the forum to feel free to discuss whatever they want, without the burden placed on academic writing. If tomorrow someone registers to the forum and points out the ivy/oak parallel, we can tell him that this is old news. The setting is informal enough, and since our philosophy with the forum is that it should be open to anyone, all styles of writing are okay, as long as they are polite of course.

Blog posts can really go both ways. If there is a possibility to embed your post in an existing discourse, I see no reason why not to do it. Also, since a blog post has more of a feel of a personal publication, I'd still advise to avoid plagiarism. We are doing research, not writing about kittens. If you used a source, just mention it, that's common sense.

Rene, you also seem to imply that all (good) academic writing is peer reviewed. That's just not true. On the one hand, I've read extremely interesting and well informed papers on academia.edu that were unpublished and unreviewed elsewhere, just to give one example.
And on the other hand, if peer review were a guarantee for academic quality, we wouldn't get Talbert & Tucker style papers (Nick summarizes it well here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ). It seems that Voynich research requires such a multidisciplinary approach that peer review has little impact on the reliability of the publication.

Koen,

I deliberately put 'quality stamp' in quotation marks because it is indeed not always guaranteed to work.

Edit (addition):

Quote:I've read extremely interesting and well informed papers on academia.edu

Koen, many Voynich blogs are interesting and well-informed. (Also some blogs about kittens..... )

That is still a different thing, however.

What academia.edu brings, on the other hand, is that it opens an article for review by academic peers, who may voluntarily provide feedback.

Let's not confuse "academic writing" and "academic publication". "Academic publication" is a publication in an academic edition. A blog post or a forum post is not an "academic publication". "Academic writing", on the other hand, is writing that adheres to the principles, styles and standards of academic publications. A blog post or a forum post may or may not represent academic writing.

Quote:After a positive review, the paper is published, has a date and basically a 'quality stamp'.

Quality is a tricky question. Quite a number of academic publications do not boast high quality. Many still, have no scientific value whatsoever.

Time will tell whether the academic journal that published the Tucker/Talbert/Janick papers made the right decision.

(20-04-2017, 05:15 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Time will tell whether the academic journal that published the Tucker/Talbert/Janick papers made the right decision.

If the journal editors were consciously trying to make fools both of themselves and of the paper writers, it would seem that they made the right decision.