e d i to ri a l
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] J U N E 1 , 2 0 0 0 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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EDITOR Royce W. Murray University of North Carolina
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Daniel W. Armstrong
Reinhard Niessner
University of Missouri–Rolla
Technische Universität München (Germany)
Catherine C. Fenselau
Robert A. Osteryoung
University of Maryland
North Carolina State University
William S. Hancock
Edward S. Yeung
AgilentTechnologies
Iowa State University/Ames Laboratory
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William B. Whitten
John Fetzer
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Chevron Research andTechnology
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Stephen A. Wise
Robert T. Kennedy
CaliperTechnologies
University of Florida
Frank V. Bright
National Institute of Standards andTechnology
State University of NewYork at Buffalo
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University of Southern Denmark
Steven A. Carr
University of Arizona
Kay Niemax
Robert M. Corn
Ex-Officio Member
Institute for Spectrochemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Germany)
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Theodore R. Williams
J. David Pinkston
Andrew Ewing
College of Wooster
Procter & Gamble
SmithKline Beecham
Matthias Mann
Kimberly Prather
Pennsylvania State University
Totaro Imasaka
A-page Advisory Panel
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Kyushu University (Japan)
Klaus Albert
Peter Schoenmakers
Viorica Lopez-Avila
University ofTubingen (Germany)
Midwest Research Institute
Philip Bartlett
Shell Research andTechnology (The Netherlands)
Andreas Manz
University of Southhampton (U.K.)
Robert L. St. Claire
Imperial College of Science,Technology and Medicine (U.K.)
Alain Berthod
Triangle Pharmaceuticals
Zbigniew Stojek
Klaus H. Mosbach
National Center for Scientific Research (France)
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Tibor Braun
Karen Wahl
Janusz Pawliszyn
Eötvös University (Hungary)
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Sylvia Daunert
Douglas Westerlund
Antonio J. Ricco
University of Kentucky
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ACLARA Biosciences
Marta E. Diaz-Garcia
John Yates
Robert S. Rush
Universidad de Oviedo (Spain)
Scripps Research Institute
Amgen
Francesco Dondi
Renato Zenobi
Isiah M. Warner
University of Ferrara (Italy)
Louisiana State University
Christine E. Evans
Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology Zurich
University of Warsaw (Poland)
University of Michigan
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