Who Owns This Stuff?

In a talk delivered at the NINES Summer Institute last year, Bethany Nowviskie asserts that, within a discipline where collaborative work is the norm, “healthier scholarship will result from generous and full acknowledgment of the contributions of collaborators.” Even more recently, in her response to Miriam Posner’s “Some Things to Think About Before You Exhort Everyone to Code,” Nowviskie makes a case for giving more attention to “the professional and intellectual development of the people already steeped in humanities computing technology and for whom this work is a primary focus and responsibility,” in order to facilitate “correlat[ion] of their local work with the bigger trends, technical and intellectual, in humanities scholarship.” Given that, as Nowviskie notes, “a gap exists, in critical vocabulary and in the norms of discourse between these groups (even including developers with deep backgrounds in humanistic research),” how do we ensure that all participants in a project enjoy an opportunity to derive professional benefits from the collaboration, including rights to access, publish about, and build upon the resulting code and artifacts? In this session, I propose we use the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” as a starting point for discussion. How might we instantiate these recommendations in our own projects? What other practices or policies might we add to the list? Given the ad hoc process through which digital humanities working groups and projects are sometimes formed, how do we integrate a conversation about giving credit where it is due and rights of ownership (including, but in no way limited to copyright) as an essential first stage? Can we begin drafting sensible, user-friendly model policy for which we can advocate within our disciplines and institutions to help ensure adequate recognition of collaborators’ rights?