Re: review process

["Elizabeth Gadd" <E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk>]

Brian,

I have just completed an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright
transfer agreements as part of the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project
(http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html)  
Only one agreement asked authors to warrant that they had made appropriate
reference to the literature on their subject.

*************************************************
Elizabeth Gadd, Research Associate &
Editor,  Library and Information Research
Department of Information Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leics, LE11 3TU
Tel: +44 (0)1509 222178  Fax: +44 (0)1509 223053
Email: E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk
************************************************

> ------------------------------
> From: Brian Simboli <brs4@lehigh.edu>
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: review process
>
> Has anyone discussed the following--should it not become standard practice
> for a journal to require, of an author submitting work, that they identify
> what strategy they used for searching for simlilar literature in the major
> bibliographic databases? (A colleague and I were talking about doing this
> for a paper.) That way the reviewer can recap the searches, plus do any
> additional work of their own, in order to see whether: (a.) the author has
> stolen material, or (b.) the author was perhaps unintentionally aware that
> someone else divulged the idea. Perhaps it can also become a standard to
> publish in the article the relevant bibliographic dbase searches that were
> used to ascertain that the article's subject had not been dealt with
> before. That way the publisher can defend themselves by noting that due
> diligence was in fact already done. Of course librarians would have to get
> in the loop in many cases to design solid searches, which would help
> increase recognition of how important they are (or can be) to the research
> process and to the publishing of its results. Why not routinely make them
> part of peer review, at least in those disciplines where the number of
> publications increases exponentially with each passing decade.
>
> Brian Simboli
> Lehigh University
> (610) 758-5003
> Fax (610) 758-6524
> E-mail:  brs4@lehigh.edu