Managing Sharing/Secrecy Tensions around Scientific Knowledge Disclosure

• In Event: 511 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Paper Session. Topics in Science, Knowledge and Technology Studies

Abstract

This paper explores how researchers with knowledge of how to perform a valuable scientific technique confront and manage competing pressures to share this knowledge and to keep it secret. Based upon qualitative analyses of 46 interviews and 76 oral histories with knowledgeable practitioners, I document the different practices by which researchers shared knowledge of how to perform four key techniques in biotechnology and digital audio. I then analyze how both academically- and commercially-motivated pressures towards sharing and secrecy shaped these practices and I show how researchers employed four tactics -- personal relationships, strategic withholding, delay, and patents -- to manage sharing/secrecy tensions. My findings contribute to the literature on knowledge-sharing by showing how different sharing practices work together to form a "sharing ecology"; by illustrating how different pressures tied to "public science" and "private science" are associated with different sharing practices; and by analyzing the ways in which researchers resolve these tensions. More generally, I present a theoretical model of how these elements interact to constitute a knowledge sharing process.

Author

• Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon