Weblication & Future Publication

[Patricia F Anderson]

A group of our faculty are having a raging discussion about whether or not
weblication precludes and prevents future print publication in a refereed
journal. 

My suggestion was to perhaps only put portions of the idea or paper on the
web, something meaty enough to attract attention, but keeping the full
explanation for a print publication. I also am aware of the discussion
which has been prominent in the biological, medical and life sciences
lately with Harold Varmus' E-BIOMED (PubMedCentral) proposal:

  http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.htm
  http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebi.htm

E-BIOMED proposed that participating journals would allow preprints of
articles to be archived and publicly available prior to print publication,
without penalty to the author. This, as you might imagine, has been seen
as an inflammatory suggestion. The response from the Biochemical Society
can be found at:

Biochemical Society Response: http://www.biochemistry.org/ebiomedresp.htm
ASM Response: http://www.asmusa.org/ebiomed.htm
ASPP Response: http://aspp.org/ebiosci/original.htm
Other Comments and Discussion:
  http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/comment.htm

I've been looking for recent publications about whether or not a faculty
member is taking his professional life in his hands if he makes his work
independently available. I have found very little online. 

Science Tribune - Article - March 1997 
Scientific publishing : Paper or perish
David Atherton1, David Steffen2, Sinai Yarus3
http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/art97/yaru1.htm

Harnad, Stevan.  SCHOLARLY SKYWRITING AND THE PREPUBLICATION CONTINUUM OF
SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html
-- The Invisible hand of peer review.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
Exploit Interactive, Issue 5, April 7, 2000. 

I have been encouraging the faculty to contribute to such an archive, to
encourage their journals to contribute, and to either support such an
effort or to create their own dental literature prepublication archive,
modeled on the E-BIOMED proposal or the Los Alamos project 
(http://xxx.lanl.gov).

Do you know of other similar articles I could bring to their attention, OR
anything which clarifies the copyright law with respect to this issue. 

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!

Pat Anderson,
UM Dentistry Library
pfa at umich.edu