Fragmentation or Modularity: Boundaries Between New Scholarly Formats and Unethical Practices

Abstract

Research ethics treats the fragmentation of research into least publishable units ('salami slicing') as unacceptable, whereas the digital infrastructure of science builds extreme fragmentation into the foundations of promising new formats – nanopublications, micropublications, machine-readable modules of knowledge. These practices are not identical but involve a common formal operation – dividing the scholarly message into smaller units that are published and cited separately; we propose to treat this contradiction as a problem of scholarly communication. The ban on fragmentation is historically tied to the printed journal article as the dominant form of the scholarly message and to counting contribution by the number of publications; machine-readable aggregation infrastructures make it possible to address and attribute contribution at the level of the individual result, changing the conditions under which such division harms scholarly communication. We do not abolish the moral assessment of fragmentation (misconduct vs. integrity) but complement it with a configurational one: the consequences of the operation depend on the form, purpose and addressee of the message – and the addressee of scholarly communication is, increasingly often, not only a human. Changes in the functioning of the communication infrastructure also raise the question of how evaluation systems should change and what can count as a unit of contribution to science.