As a scholar of scholarly communication and how information and communication technologies change it, I am fascinated and amazed at the ongoing shenanigans in the medieval manuscripts/fragmentology world (via Betsy on Library Society of the World). Start here: “Nobody cares about your blog!” https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html and follow on with the subsequent pieces there.
Apparently, Mr Kidd has published original research on his blog for more than ten years. His research includes reconstructing medieval manuscripts that have been broken and pages sold individually. He and others in his field use, among other things, sale catalogs and images from collector sites, libraries, museums, etc. Sale catalogs also apparently have original research and scholarly writing as part of their item descriptions (I am not of this world and am open to correction, for sure).
Auction catalogues often contain original research, and often contain descriptions and images of manuscripts that are otherwise completely unpublished. Their value to scholarship is immense. Prof. Rossi appears not to know this.
Peter Kidd: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-v.html
A book was recently published open access, which was funded by a European national funding body, that used original images and text from the blog without attribution. Some text was copied word for word and some was paraphrased. Images the author had gotten from manuscript owners were copied.
Mr. Kidd contacted the publisher because he couldn’t find any direct e-mail for the author. A secretary replied with a couple pretty mean e-mails. Later the author posted documents with some other fascinating statements.
- It’s CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensed and downloads are “forbidden”
- “Every image of the De Roucy manuscript was obtained through the WayBack method, from collectors and dealers.” [is the WayBack method seriously using Archive.org and assuming whatever you find there or on Google images is fair game? because really?]
- “I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!” [doesn’t mean you don’t cite it, though, if you use it!]
- Some online people looked and there are stock photos used for some of the members of the publishing house staff, the address isn’t legit, and the pictures are not of that address. If you’re going to fabricate an identity, you need to be more thorough in today’s world.
- The cost for humanities scholars to publish a book OA: 20K?
- The book was reportedly peer reviewed – if this was done by knowledgeable scholars in the field… how?
- “Also, perhaps worth remembering, blog posts do not have a DOI number and it can happen that the information provided is scientifically unreliable.” [having a DOI doesn’t make the content any more or less reliable]
More here: https://twitter.com/mssprovenance/status/1606653720174944257