ES&T EDITORIAL
Prior publication problems The cornerstone of the editorial policy of most se rious scientific journals is the requirement for the complete and full interpretation of the results of original research. Peer reviewers and editors spend a great deal of time making judgments of degrees of "completion" and fullness of "interpretation." Here, however, I want to address some editorial problems pertaining to the originality criterion. The dimensions of originality become more com plicated upon closer scrutiny. In editorial usage, the term originality has several aspects of meaning, in cluding multiple publication of the same work, as well as the significance of the work as an incremental ad dition to the literature. Presently, I am addressing only the former aspect, that is, the problem of prior publi cation. The American Chemical Society stated in 1959 that It is the opinion of the Committee of Editors that appearance of a paper in any medium usu ally abstracted by Chemical Abstracts, or in any publication readily available from recog nized sources (such as various government agencies), or its wide distribution by other means before it is offered to an A C S journal constitutes prior publication. To be sure, the 1959 policy statement reflects a useful spirit that aims at the publication of truly novel material or at least avoids meaningless duplication. Today, however, this position is inappropriate because of the explosion of scientific research in the last twoand-a-half decades, and the attendant growth in the number of scientific journals, as well as in federal sponsorship of research. Nowadays, virtually all sponsored research requires some kind of report and most conferences and sym posia have proceedings or summaries; and these events appear at all times to be related to independent sub missions to journals and involve all degrees of peer review. The problem may be particularly acute in the environmental sciences area, with the massive flow of
0013-936X/82/0916-0489A$0.125/0
federal dollars through state and municipal agencies, and the many requirements for predevelopment evaluation in the public domain. Thus an editorial requirement that would exclude all government pub lications from consideration for journal publication is unnecessarily restrictive, although one which would accept all government publications is unnecessarily liberal. When manuscript content is similar or identical to a government or agency report, important factors for editors and authors to consider ought to include the extent of distribution and availability of the prior document; the degree of prior peer review; and the timeliness of the subject, in addition to the nature and characteristics of the intended audience. Any of these factors may be given more latitude when the manu script content is dissimilar to the prior document. Quite apart from earlier government document publication, there is the matter of data or method reinterpretation or expansion by authors who are revising their own work or the work of others that has appeared in a scientific journal. An important criterion in these cases is the degree to which the conclusions of the earlier work have been modified. Overriding all of these criteria is the recognition that the scientific literature, of which journals are an important part, is both the principal form in which scientific understanding exists and the means by which it is changed. The appearance in the literature of unoriginal work is a disservice to the scientific com munity in that the author may receive the benefits from an additional publication whereas the costs of a bloated literature are borne by us all. Attitudes are probably our most fundamental guarantee against meaningless duplication—attitudes that see a "greater good" in a leaner literature and which, when applied consistently by editors, produce a more useful literature.
© 1982 American Chemical Society
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Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 16, No. 9, 1982
489A
