Newsletter
Volume 29 | 2006 | Number 3
Disseminating Behavior Analysis through Archival Publications
By Dr. A. Charles Catania
The continuity of populations, whether consisting of members of species, bits of behavior, groups of individuals within societies, or instances of cultural practices, depends on the selection of variations by their consequences. Our field consists of multitudes of individuals engaging in research and applications. Whether their practices survive will depend on what we do to pass them on not only to each other and to our students but also to our contemporaries outside of behavior analysis. Our publications are central to those objectives.
In our shared human origins phylogenic selection (of the Darwinian variety) has been the basis for our evolutionary history; ontogenic selection (of the operant variety) has been the basis for our various individual repertoires. But what makes our field special is particularly the product of a different level of selection that operates not upon the behavior of the individual organism but rather upon what can be passed on from one organism to another.
Skinner called one version of such selection cultural selection; the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called another but similar version memetic selection. A central issue is that of determining the units of selection, and for our purposes the appropriate units in cultural selection must be behavioral ones (the production of phonemes and methods for preparing ethnic cuisines are two examples). Furthermore, those behavioral units most relevant to the survival of our research methods and their applications in the midst of the vast diversities of contemporary human societies must be verbal ones. A researcher working alone in a laboratory may make marvelous discoveries, but that work can have no impact if it is never reported. An applied behavior analyst may develop new techniques while working with an individual client or within a special classroom, but if those in other places do not learn about these new practices they will not spread.
We do of course discuss our work at our professional meetings, and certainly we sometimes learn important things about behavior from each other in such settings, but the products of such practices are too often ephemeral. What does it take to access the details of a twentieth-century ABA presentation or to locate information about a poster presented at a recent meeting? This will of course get easier as ABA develops an on-line archive of its convention programs, but while such archiving will help in locating authors and other information, we are no doubt still some way from an archive that preserves the full content of presentations and posters. Such problems are not unique to ABA, and in fact there is much to be said for maintaining an environment in which presenters can test the reactions of audiences and in which audiences can shape the skills of presenters: How often have we felt that it is just as well that our first tentative presentation of some new procedure or finding has not been captured in a permanent archive?
In any case, the point is that conventions and publications have different functions, and it is our publications that are the repository of the essential components of our field. They will not substitute for what happens in classrooms, on-line courses, workshops, training sites, or laboratories, but they will remain crucial adjuncts to such settings, as when a faculty member assigns journal readings in an advanced course or a supervisor provides treatment guides or handouts.
The future of behavior analysis is not only a matter of archiving its accomplishments in journals and related publications. It also depends on how easily the archives can be accessed and how likely relevant material in those archives can be found. Significant progress has already been made elsewhere, as when, given the initiatives of Victor G. Laties and the support of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, all of the back issues of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis have become available on line through PubMed Central. Other organizations have moved to on-line publishing (e.g., as with the journal Behavior and Philosophy from the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies), and ABA has begun taking steps to make The Behavior Analyst (TBA) and Analysis of Verbal Behavior (AVB) similarly available on line.
It is important for all of us to support ABA as it moves in these directions not only for the increased accessibility of our literature within the field, but for increased visibility outside of the field. An on-line archive will make it more likely that those from other disciplines will discover some of what we have been doing for some decades now, as their literature searches include our work among their hits.
There will be constraints. Some indexing operations require certain features in certain formats (e.g., abstracts or key words) before including journals in their databases, but the cost of conforming to such requirements is amply repaid if the outcome is that the content of those journals is more widely seen. Input to ABA from those with expertise in topics such as Web site design that makes site content more likely to be picked up by search engines will be invaluable. The Web is a new means by which we can pass our verbal products on to others. But that world is an exceedingly competitive one, and we cannot afford to drop out of the continuing selection that the Web engenders. The competition exists not only within the larger context of human cultures but also within our field and related disciplines such as psychology, as on-line journals, lists, and other vehicles for maintaining records of verbal behavior proliferate, each with its idiosyncratic mechanisms for editorial oversight, review, opportunities for commentary, and so on. The junior faculty member who will be up for review on a tenure track would do well to choose those publication outlets that are most likely to be indexed and to produce visibility, especially if that individual will be judged in a department with few, if any, other behavior analytic colleagues. Our publications must allow for these as well as other contingencies that will affect the ways in which our field is seen by others.
Once ABA has gone on line with its journals, it will have set a crucial precedent. Many new opportunities will become available. For example, some international behavior analytic journals have been publishing for some time (e.g., in Mexico and in Japan); others have only recently begun (e.g., in Brazil). Perhaps our organization can provide resources to international chapters to help them bring their behavioral journals on line (one candidate is the European Journal of Behavior Analysis, which to date is available mainly in print format). Once TBA and AVB become on-line journals, one possibility is that their content might also include, as mirror publications, what had appeared in the journals of affiliated chapters; those journals could maintain their separate editorial identities and criteria while at the same time making their contents more generally available on line (precedent exists in the sectional structure offered by some of the journals of major scientific organizations). Print journals continue to be costly, so such on-line publication would offer economies along with vastly enhanced accessibility.
The potential benefits are enormous, so possible startup costs in time and in effort should not stand in our way. Our future as a discipline is inseparable from the future of our publications. It would be premature to try to spell out the details, but our field will undoubtedly benefit immensely by moving as quickly as possible to making our literature readily and broadly available on the Web. We must not only pass on our work to each other and to our students; we must also do all we can to help it migrate to new environments.