EDITORIAL
Controlled Publication Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another
Proverbs 27:17
This message can be regarded as a desire to reverse an observable inertia. Think of scientists/engineers in the research centers of competing corporations. There is a subjective, ambivalent, fraternal, and well-controlled professional regard but no cronyism among them. Even though it turns out that each is doing what a counterpart is doing in another laboratory, the professional ethic is to guard, to hide and to seclude so as to assure a clear advantage in reduction to practice of the next segment of the industrial revolution. Good planning. After forty years of participation in the above game plan, this editor is now adjunct to the engineering faculty at a prestigious university and in a position to interface the disciplines of academic research with potential industrial interests. Attitudinally, the difference is not only apparent, it is volcanic. In the heart of the faculty, the battle-cry is Be Identified: wrap up a set of results and publish; let the world, especially the faculties with affinity interest, know of the progress, the discoveries, the promises. Now here is an observation: An isolated distinction between the two loci (university/industry) is major. If the former were suddenly transfixed and indentured to the service of an industrial research director-heaven forbid!-the years’ results would be locked in a vault, work contracts signed, secrecy pledged and a corps of patent writers would search the dark or illuminated corners for opportunities seeking to secure monopoly through the granting of letters patent. Lacking the funds, or having good sense, such consummate action is not considered in the ivy halls. The example is unreal for it assumes that the fever for profitable pragmatism can readi,ly be homogenized into the idealism of probing for new concepts and without losing the desirable dynamism of the two separate forces. In this imagined amalgamation, the industry technologists may find little practical value in the staff from the academy. “Too Basic.” Now, my short memory is long enough to recall that 98% of potential patent applications have no profit in them, and regularily because the discovery is shallow (read “lacks redeeming quality of basically new matter”). Examined from my mental perspective, we thus come full orbit to the interesting recognition of two attitudes which neutralize each other. The difference is manifest in the incredible zeal and freedom of the professor to tell all to all who would hear and the contrary mentality of the same talent in industry which is trapped in the tradition to believe that from all good works might be derived the seed of commercial domination. This is not a case of choosing between alternates of equal repugnance. We accept that the professor and the industrial person fit symbiotically and separated, each with freedom to publish or withhold. The correct and accepted conclusion is that publication from industrial centers is controlled-a term which can identify anything from management policy to personal apathy to the quality of reporting practices. All this in the name of protecting the 2% of valuable inventions. Any of the reasons may have the dimensions of myopia. There are always (if the work be methodical and of good quality) substantial portions having no “secrecy value” the offering of which would do credit to the investigators and vicariously to the corporation and the morale of the laboratory staff. But the advantage to a realistic, more generous policy on publication is the positive ’ value to the quality of the work if only that review by peers forces an exposure of lacks in the experimentation, weakness in interpretation and the quality of presentation. Writing to professional standards helps to further intellectualize the problem. One man sharpens another. Let’s face it. Despite the vigilance of supervision, some results from industrial work have a Goldilocks syndrome. It was not planned that way, but the drive for practical result may disguise the inadequacy and the hidden traps to conclusions extrapolated from unaudited work. Failure to search under the umbrella of expanding conceptual knowledge may indeed be the reason that the slag heap of a hundred patents-applied-for contains 98 cases labeled too hot or too cold. Praise be to the occasional one which shares the legacy of greatness by disclosing something just right.
Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania June 1975 Ind. Eng. Chern., Prod. Res. Dev., Vol. 14, No. 2, 1975 73
