re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"

Stevan Harnad fails to give Eugene Garfield full credit below. Dr Garfield is indeed an outstanding information scientist and innovator. He is also President and Editor-in- Chief of The Scientist, a newspaper that emphasizes advances in research. <http://www.the-scientist.com/masthead.htm>

News organizations that aim to "scoop" breaking news, like The Scientist, The New York Times [NYT] and The Medical Tribune, are often frustrated by the "Ingelfinger rule" of the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM] and other primary journals. The rule, named after the NEJM editor who devised it, calls for rejecting any submission that was released in any medium including press releases, interviews, etc. Observing the rule, scientists won't talk to reporters about work which they plan to submit to NEJM et al. In 1991, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times ran an article -- more like a 'rant' -- excoriating the Ingelfinger rule under the title "With lives at stake, issue is secrecy of data."

The reason for the rule given by NEJM, et al., is that unvetted research may yield false conclusions. While this poses little danger in some fields, in biomedicine it may be a menace to public health and safety. Moreover, it is clear that many news organizations are irresponsible, given to breathless announcements that the general public takes to be endorsements of cures for cancer, heart disease, old age, etc. While I don't think The Scientist and NYT are in the category of breathless irresponsibility, it is clear that they and most preprint readers are not equipped to evaluate research claims as thoroughly as the editors of NEJM et al.

Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 <70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com>

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Date:	9/2/2002  3:37 AM

RE:	Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"

 

These two papers by Eugene Garfield -- founder of the Insitute for Scientific Information, Current Contents, Science Citation Index, and originator of the Citation Impact Factor -- might be of interest to the Open Access community:

    "I believe that posting and sharing one's preliminary publications     [is] an important part of the peer... review process and does     not justify an embargo by publishers on the grounds of 'prior     publication'. It was not the case before the Internet, and exceot     for unusual clinical situations, has not changed because of the     convenience of the Internet." (Garfield, 2000)

    Garfield, E. (2000) Is Acknowledged Self-Archiving Prior     Publication? Presented at Third International Symposium     on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Mar 17 2000     http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/Presentations/Garfield-Web-Publishing.pdf

    Garfield, E. (1999) Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not     Prior Publication. The Scientist 13(12): 12 (June 7, 1999)     http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1999/June/comm_990607.html

I am of course in complete agreement with Eugene Garfield -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 -- and would demur only on one point -- minor for what Gene is saying, but rather major for what should be motivating researchers to self-archive in the first place -- namely, that self-archiving DOES provide far greater visibility in the on-line age than on-paper publication alone does. This too is documented (but it in no way changes the thrust of Gene's very correct observation, and advice to authors and publishers).

Lawrence, S. (2001a) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (6837): 521. http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

Lawrence, S. (2001b) Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact. Nature Web Debates.
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html

Odlyzko, A.M. (2002) The rapid evolution of scholarly communication." Learned Publishing 15: 7-19
http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/odlyzko.pdf

Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5): 629-638.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/97/index.html

Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus Online. Computer Law & Security Report 16(2) 78-87. [Rebuttal to Bloom Editorial in Science and Relman Editorial in New England Journal of Medicine]
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/01/index.html

Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/03/index.html

Harnad, S. (2001) "Research access, impact and assessment." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/83/index.html

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):

    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

                            or

Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum[_at_]amsci-forum.amsci.org

See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

    http://www.soros.org/openaccess

and the Free Online Scholarship Movement:

    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm Received on Tue Sep 03 2002 - 22:06:44 GMT