Publishing More Industrial Research: Maybe We Can Help - Analytical

Publishing More Industrial Research: Maybe We Can Help. Thomas L. Chester. Anal. Chem. , 2000, 72 (11), pp 373 A–373 A. DOI: 10.1021/ac0028346...
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Publishing More Industrial Research: Maybe We Can Help I

ndustrial analytical chemists benefit greatly from reading Analytical Chemistry, but these readers, with respect to their numbers, rarely contribute to the Journal. Is this just the nature of industrial jobs, or are other factors at work? In my view, there are three important factors: Some employers discourage or prohibit publication; other employers only tolerate publication as long as it causes no harm to the business or delays the “real” work of the company; and many industrial researchers are just too discouraged to attempt publishing, even if it is allowed. There are many reasons why it makes good business sense to publish some fraction of industrial research, particularly in analytical chemistry. For example, disclosure and peer review through publication help advocate new analytical methods as industry standards. These are also good first steps for building persuasive arguments leading to more formal regulatory approval of new methods or techniques. External peer review also ensures that the work meets a high standard and can stimulate additional improvements. This can be valuable both to individuals and to their work environment. Publication also provides an employer with an unimpeded right to practice employees’ inventions when patenting is not part of the company’s business goals. This is often the case in businesses that do analytical chemistry but have no analytical products. Without disclosure, a competitor could eventually patent a similar invention and thereby block its practice or require royalties. Some contributing factors to author’s discouragement and disinterest in publishing arise from outside their employers’ businesses. Here, we have a chance to help. Publishers should cooperatively adopt an industry-standard, copyright-transfer form that reflects their interests and those of authors and their employers. Most industrial authors are considered to perform works made for hire. When copyright is transferred, intellectual property belonging to an employer is signed over to a publisher. Therefore, many employers require that a copyright transfer form, like any contract, be approved by an attorney and executed by

an appropriate officer. If the employer conducts diversified research, the attorneys must deal with different transfer forms from dozens of publishers. All of these forms accomplish essentially the same things, but each has to be approved individually. This creates redundancy and extra work for the attorneys and delays and discouragement for authors. These problems could easily be eliminated with a little cooperation within the publishing industry. Publishers should automatically grant permission to authors to reuse their own tables and figures in derivative scholarly works. Also, publishers should not insist that authors who reuse their own work provide written permission from the first publisher. ACS, in its copyright transfer form, grants permission to the original authors to publish derivative works, but this is not the case among all publishers. Requirements for demonstrating permission vary. Regardless, it is common for an author writing a derivative work or a review to spend many hours identifying publishers, finding addresses, sending permission requests, keeping track of responses, and inserting the correct permission wording into the manuscript. This is particularly discouraging when the author is reapplying his or her own work. All publishers should grant this permission automatically and accept when this has been done by others. These are two very small steps, but if ACS exists for the members and not vice versa, shouldn’t we expect it and other scientific societies to address these barriers to individual professionalism and champion these sorts of improvements among publishers? Perhaps analytical chemists can be the catalysts of change. And perhaps we’ll see more industrial contributions within these pages.

Thomas L. Chester The Procter & Gamble Company [email protected]

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