On Monday, February 17, 2003, at 02:46 AM, Pete Capelli wrote:
And those many researchers already doing government-sponsored or -classified work already know about the many limitations on their publishing. It is up to their employers to review their papers before they are submitted for publication, not for journals to try to second-guess what might be classified or not.Mike Rosing wrote:On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, Pete Capelli wrote:http://abc.net.au/news/scitech/2003/02/item20030216103135_1.htm "Self-governance," the editors say, is "an alternative to governmentreviewYes, but this article referred to articles not under this requirement due toof forthcoming journal articles."Depends on the subject and who paid for the research. If the DOE pays
I don't edit any science journals, but I would expect there is no law
requiring 'government review'. So what are the editors talking about?
for something that might be interesting for patenting, they want to
make sure an article doesn't get published before the paperwork is in for
the patents. So that's not totally unreasonable.
funding; otherwise, 'self-governance' would not have been an option in the
first place.
(Same thing I faced when publishing articles while at Intel. Journal editors did not try to second-guess whether the papers I submitted were approved or not approved for release by Intel. It was my ass in the sling if I published something sensitive. Ditto for government workers and researchers.)
A committee of publishers talking about self-censorship as "an alternative to government review" is doing exactly what it sounds like: they're self-censoring under threat of "do it or we'll do it for you."
It shouldn't need to be said, but the Bill of Rights specifically forbids prior restraint and review of publications.
--Tim May
