Re: Let 1000 flowers bloom/blume

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

A message sent by Dr. Martin Blume (APS & member of the American Academy
Working Group) to the American Scientist Forum.  This one is very much
worth reading because Dr. Blume is both a notable research scientist
*and* a significant journals editor-in-chief.

_________________________________________________

Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 16:19:42 -0400
From: Martin Blume <blume@bnl.gov>
Subject: Re: Let 1000 flowers bloom/blume

Dear Stevan,

I'd like to enter the following comment to the American Scientist
discussion of the "Transition from Paper" article in Science, and Floyd
Bloom's responding editorial. This is my personal view and not necessarily
that of the rest of the group. (But, as Bob Park says, "It should be"!)
Marty
_______________

The issue that has been raised in the "Transition from Paper" article is
really the right of an author to be free from restraints in circulating
his/her ideas. Keeping copyright is just one way of accomplishing this,
but it's not the only one. The signatories of the paper believe that an
author should not be penalized and should be free to announce results in
advance of publishing, to post or update articles on an eprint server, to
circulate an article from a web page, and to distribute reprints
electronically or otherwise. Since many publishers, Science included,
prohibit one or another of these desireable "rights" we have put forward
copyright retention for consideration as a solution. The central issues
are in my view the rights and not merely copyright.

The American Physical Society, of which I am Editor-in-Chief, recognizes
those rights explicitly in its copyright form. The author transfers
copyright to the Society, but retains the rights enumerated above. The
reverse situation, where the author retains copyright but gives a license
to the publisher, would be acceptable to us if the license were
sufficiently broad to allow us to do, in future, whatever we want to do
with the article. We have just put on line all of Physical Review back to
1985 (100,000 articles!), and expect eventually to go back to 1893. We
would not have been able to do this if we had a license to publish these
earlier works but no mention had been made in that license of electronic
distribution. We need to be able to do the unforeseen as well as the
foreseen in order to assure the widest possible distribution of the
information, which is ultimately the goal of any scholarly publisher. This
must be done while we, at the same time, recover our costs for added
value. We have to date managed to do this, but must be imaginative in the
future as the world changes.

One further point that has been introduced into the discussion is the idea
that a copyright holder is more likely than a licensee to pursue
plagiarists. I do not believe this. Plagiarism is not a prosecuted because
it is a copyright violation. Any learned society would pursue plagiarists
because plagiarism is grossly unethical and strikes at the heart of the
scholarly process.