Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination (PIRD): An Archival Authorship Method

Overview

This concept note advances Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination (PIRD) as a methodological intervention in scholarly authorship, dissemination, and archiving. PIRD formalises the deliberate production, release, and long-term preservation of research outputs as paired, parallel artefacts that are intentionally designed for different audiences while constituting co-equal expressions of a single intellectual contribution. Rather than positioning accessibility as a secondary concern, the method embeds inclusive dissemination at the core of scholarly production.

Departing from dominant scholarly models that treat accessibility, translation, or public-facing outputs as supplementary to a primary academic text, PIRD reframes inclusivity as an epistemic and ethical condition intrinsic to research practice itself. The method does not ask how research might be made accessible once knowledge has already been produced, legitimised, and archived. Instead, it asks how accessibility reshapes what counts as scholarship, who is recognised as a researcher, and how knowledge is authorised, preserved, cited, and reused across time and contexts.

PIRD responds to persistent structural exclusions embedded in contemporary knowledge production and circulation. These exclusions arise through the interaction of paywalled publishing regimes, disciplinary linguistic norms, conventional academic genres, and institutional gatekeeping infrastructures that regulate legitimacy, visibility, and recognition. Together, these systems determine not only who can access research but whose knowledge endures within the scholarly record. PIRD asserts that dissemination is not a downstream communicative act but a constitutive dimension of scholarly authorship, responsibility, and intellectual completeness. In contrast to inclusive dissemination and open science approaches that prioritise access as an end in itself, PIRD intervenes explicitly at the level of authorship and archival infrastructure, specifying how epistemic contribution is rendered durable, citable, and recognisable as scholarship over time.

Problem Statement

Contemporary scholarly systems privilege a limited and highly standardised set of dissemination formats, most notably peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs. These formats are optimised for audiences possessing institutional affiliation, disciplinary socialisation, and tolerance for technical abstraction. While indispensable for scholarly continuity, evaluation, and academic career progression, they simultaneously function as exclusionary mechanisms for non-academic stakeholders, including practitioners, disabled people, community members, policy actors, advocates, and research participants.

In response to these exclusions, inclusive research has increasingly adopted the language of co-design, co-production, and co-research. These approaches represent substantive advances over extractive research models by redistributing participation across research processes and recognising lived experience as epistemically valuable. They have reshaped ethical norms, methodological practices, and expectations of collaboration across many research domains. However, these approaches frequently preserve an implicit epistemic hierarchy: participation is enabled without conferring full researcher status. Individuals may contribute to research questions, analytic interpretation, data sense-making, or dissemination activities while remaining excluded from authorship, archival recognition, and the durable attribution of knowledge production.

This hierarchy is rarely resolved at the point of dissemination. Decisions regarding format, authorship, citation, and archiving operate as the structural mechanisms through which epistemic contribution is ultimately converted into scholarly legitimacy or rendered invisible. Even where inclusive intentions are strong, dissemination practices often reassert traditional boundaries between those who contribute knowledge and those who are recognised as knowledge producers within formal scholarly systems.

The Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination Method

Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination addresses this contradiction by establishing a formal expectation that scholarly work be released in a minimum of two parallel artefacts, conceived from project inception and archived in explicit relation to one another. The pairing is intentional, planned, and integrated into the research lifecycle rather than appended as an afterthought or framed as optional dissemination labour.

The method comprises two core components that are distinct in form but equivalent in scholarly status:

Both artefacts are authored intentionally, released concurrently, cross-referenced, and archived with equivalent scholarly status. Together, they constitute a single compound scholarly object whose intellectual integrity depends on the presence of both components.

Archival-Based Authorship

PIRD is explicitly articulated as an archival-based authorship model rather than a dissemination technique or outreach strategy. Authorship is conceptualised as distributed across a constellation of artefacts rather than concentrated within a single definitive text. Within this model, the archive itself constitutes the primary scholarly object, and authorship is understood as a function of epistemic contribution rather than credentialed identity, institutional affiliation, or genre conformity.

This orientation ensures that accessibility-oriented work is preserved, citable, and attributable; that diverse audiences may enter the scholarly record through multiple points without encountering epistemic barriers by design; and that the archive records not only what knowledge was produced, but how responsibility for its circulation, interpretation, and reuse was enacted. Archiving is thus treated as an ethical and epistemic act rather than a neutral technical process.

By co-archiving inclusive and scholarly artefacts, PIRD resists the routine erasure of accessibility labour and embeds inclusion within the durable infrastructure of the scholarly record rather than relying on goodwill, advocacy, or informal dissemination channels that lack permanence and citability.

Epistemic and Ethical Contributions

The method advances three interrelated contributions—epistemic, infrastructural, and normative—which collectively reframe how inclusion, authorship, and scholarly legitimacy are understood within contemporary research systems.

Scope and Application

Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination is designed as a cross-domain, adaptable method applicable to theoretical scholarship, policy analysis, applied research, evaluative frameworks, and participatory or community-engaged projects. It is particularly salient in domains addressing structural inequality, access, governance, education, disability, and institutional power, where questions of legitimacy and voice are central.

While the method does not prescribe specific dissemination formats, it requires intentional pairing, co-equal archival status, contribution-based authorship, and archival permanence as non-negotiable methodological commitments that shape research design from the outset.

Landscape and Background: From Co-Design to Archival Authorship

PIRD is situated within a well-established body of inclusive research literature, particularly work on co-design, co-production, and co-research in health, education, and disability studies (e.g., Nind, 2014; Hewitt et al., 2023). Over the past two decades, these traditions have played a critical role in challenging extractive research models by foregrounding collaboration, lived experience, and shared decision-making as legitimate dimensions of knowledge production.

However, this literature has tended to focus on participation within research processes rather than on the infrastructural conditions through which epistemic contribution is converted into durable scholarly status. As a result, inclusive research risks reproducing a softened epistemic hierarchy: contribution without authorship, voice without archival trace, and collaboration without enduring recognition.

This limitation becomes most visible at dissemination, where inclusive intentions are frequently translated into outreach products rather than incorporated into the scholarly record itself. PIRD intervenes at this juncture by extending inclusive research principles into the domains of authorship and archiving, reframing inclusive research as an infrastructural rather than solely procedural project.

Anticipating Common Objections

PIRD is likely to invite objections grounded in concerns about rigor, standards, authorship legitimacy, and quality control. Such concerns warrant explicit engagement rather than dismissal.

Claims that inclusive or accessible artefacts dilute rigor rest on an implicit conflation of rigor with opacity. PIRD does not relax standards of evidence or critique; rather, it introduces an additional constraint requiring that core claims be rendered intelligible beyond a narrow disciplinary audience. This constraint often exposes conceptual weaknesses that remain hidden within highly specialised discourse.

Concerns regarding authorship inflation similarly misidentify the source of epistemic legitimacy. PIRD does not advocate indiscriminate attribution, but alignment between epistemic labour and infrastructural recognition. Where individuals meaningfully contribute to conceptualisation, interpretation, articulation, or sense-making, withholding authorship reflects institutional convention rather than scholarly principle.

Taken together, these objections reveal that debates about rigor, authority, and quality are ultimately debates about infrastructure—specifically, who is authorised to author, archive, and confer scholarly legitimacy. Accordingly, PIRD prioritises infrastructural change over attitudinal change, recognising that durable inclusion cannot be achieved through goodwill alone.

Method in Practice: Implementation Principles

Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination is specified at the level of principle rather than prescription. Core commitments include early pairing of artefacts, co-equal archival status, contribution-based authorship, accessibility by design, transparent attribution practices, and treatment of the archive as a living scholarly object capable of revision, expansion, and critical response over time.

Worked Micro-Example: From Co-Research to Archival Authorship

To illustrate the operation of PIRD while foregrounding its structural mechanics rather than documenting a specific case, consider a conceptual research project examining institutional gatekeeping in public services. Under PIRD, scholarly and inclusive artefacts are produced, co-authored, cross-referenced, and archived together, ensuring that epistemic contribution is translated into durable recognition within the scholarly record.

Although abstracted, this example illustrates a transferable pattern applicable across domains in which inclusive research seeks to convert participation into authorship and archival legitimacy rather than symbolic involvement alone.

Positioning and Intended Audience

This method is directed toward researchers, research teams, and institutions engaged in inclusive, participatory, and critical research across health, social care, education, disability studies, governance, and open knowledge initiatives. It is particularly relevant for contexts in which communities have historically been positioned as subjects, beneficiaries, or consultees rather than as recognised knowledge producers.

PIRD is proposed not as a replacement for existing inclusive research frameworks, but as an infrastructural extension of them, offering a mechanism through which ethical commitments to inclusion can be realised within the formal scholarly record.

Dissemination

This concept note and its associated artefacts are released through open-access archival infrastructure (e.g., Zenodo) to support citation, reuse, critique, and iterative development. The method is advanced as a living framework, intended to evolve through application, contestation, and adaptation across disciplinary and institutional contexts.

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