Page 173 - How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 8th Edition 8th Edition
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reprinted materials, usually with a credit line reading "Reprinted with permission from (journal or book reference);
copyright (year) by (owner of copyright)."
When you do not give proper credit to sources, even brief paraphrases of someone else's work can be a violation of
the ethics of your profession. Such breaches of ethics, even if unintentional, may adversely affect your standing
among your peers.
Simply put, it is the responsibility of every scientist to maintain the integrity of scientific publication.
Copyright and Electronic Publishing
Traditionally, journals and books have been well defined as legal entities. However, once the same information enters
a digital environment, it becomes a compound document that includes not only text but also programming code and
database access information that has usually been created by someone (often several people) other than the author of
the paper. All copyright law, and all rules and regulations pertaining to copyright, hold true for electronic publication,
including material posted on the Internet. Unless the author or owner of the copyright of work posted on the Internet
has placed on that work a specific note stating that the item is in the public domain, it is under copyright and you may
not reproduce it without permission. Although you do not need to post a copyright notice for protection of your
Internet materials, doing so acts as a warning to people who might use your material without permission. To post such
a notice, you need only place the word "Copyright," the date of the publication, and the name of the author or
copyright owner near
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the title of the work, e.g., ''Copyright 1998 by Magon Thompson (or Sundown Press)."
Publishers are obligated to protect a copyright not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of the author. Since the
electronic version of a paper can take many forms, publishers themselves may not always be aware of possible
problems and pitfalls. You will need to make sure that the publisher of your scientific paper guarantees, in writing,
that it will accurately represent your words and intention if your paper is translated to a digital environment. For
example, conference proceedings are frequently placed on a CD-ROM, with contents, keyword, and index access to
the papers it contains. In addition, the material may include hypertext links to other information, including other
papers, graphics, and additional information added by the journal publisher. You will need to ensure that the access
the journal has provided to data on the CD or Web page from your paper, or to your paper from others, is consistent
with the way you want your work to be represented. You may trust the hardcopy format of your journal implicitly, but
once the journal goes into the electronic arena, the representation given to the paper you created may include features
that conflict with your work and ideas.
Because of the huge changes taking place in the electronic world of copyright, both publisher and author
organizations are banding together to identify and manage copyrighted documents through a database application
devoted to this purpose. One such system is the PII (Publisher Item Identifier), a tagging system for both print and
electronic formats that is used by the American Chemical Society and the American Mathematical Society, among
others. The copyright owner of a published work can generate its PII tag. Because technology is changing so rapidly
and providing so many new ways to publish and distribute data, the field of electronic copyright is also in flux.
Whenever any work in which you hold copyright is to be published in an electronic format, be sure to learn and
understand fully your rights under current copyright law.
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