Re: Citation and Rejection Statistics for Eprints and Ejournals
See message below from Robert Welham, Royal Society of Chemistry Sally Morris, Secretary-General Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-...@alpsp.org ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org Learned Publishing is now online, free of charge, at www.learned-publishing.org - Original Message - From: PUBDIR (shared) pub...@rsc.org To: Sally Morris (E-mail) sec-...@alpsp.org Sent: 08 February 2001 15:13 Subject: Rejection Rates Sally, I refer to your email on these. For most journals rejection rates cluster around 50%. I believe that that is because the majority of authors want to send their work to the most prestigious journal possible. On the other hand they know that not everything they do is good enough for Nature. So they use a number of journals and, unconsciously perhaps, send a particular manuscript to the journal highest on their pecking order for which it has an evens chance of being accepted. Rejection rates thus tend to be around 50%. It's a sort of self-assessment exercise which the old hands can get quite good at. The theory probably does not work for journals which get a lot of contributions from unprofessional authors and I guess that is why it begins to break down at the medical end where rejection rates go higher. Robert Robert Welham, Director of Publishing Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomas Graham House, Science Park Cambridge, CB4 0WF, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1223 432323, Fax: +44 (0) 1223 423429 email: welh...@rsc.org mailto:welh...@rsc.org Http://www.rsc.org Http://www.rsc.org and http://www.chemsoc.org http://www.chemsoc.org
Establishing Priority for Patents
On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Jim Till wrote:
[sh] Patented findings are of course non-give-away. Authors who wish to
[sh] protect their priority will not want to submit their unpatented
{sh] findings even to the referees of refereed journals, let alone to
[sh] have them published, until and unless they are sure the findings
[sh] have patent protection.
[sh] So they simply don't submit or publish them, of course! That's not
[sh] the concern of the self-archiving initiative, which is dedicated to
[sh] freeing from needless access barriers those papers that the author
[sh] DOES wish to make public. Papers that the author has reason NOT to
[sh] make public are simply not relevant.
jt I suspect that it's not unusual for researchers in the
jt biotechnology field to submit a manuscript for peer review, and,
jt at the same time, to begin the process of filing for patent
jt protection.
NO. If they do this they blow away any protection available elsewhere else
in the world. Only the US has the concept of 1yr gracetime. If they want
other patents they must not disclose ANYTHING until the patent is filed in
participating other countries (where filing priority dates are shared).
That includes sending it to editors - that consititutes public disclosure
and blows the case.
jt The process of filing for patent protection can be completed
jt during the time that the manuscript is being considered for
jt publication (and *isn't* in the public domain yet).
NO. Unless you have a non-disclosure agreement that is watertight with
everyone who touches the paper there will be a problem. Therefore, this is
not practical. Further, you are sending the paper to be read by JUST the
people who may know how to exploit the knowledge.
jt for patent protection - self-archive a preprint
Yes. You must file beforehand. You should also secure your data leading up
to the filing also (in case of 'diligence' challenges). Self-archiving a
preprint could be done provided it is encrypted. However, this is not
necessary. File the *hash* of the preprint only. Then, there there is
absolutely NO possibility of disclosure whatsoever.
See www.probity.org for the principles.
RSA lost their ability to patent public key encryption outside the US just
because they forgot to follow the rules above. That was rather a big mistake!
The European patent system is seriously considering a gracetime model
similar to the US, but it is going to take a very long time to happen, if
at all.
Adrian Pickering/
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
