WHAT CONSTITUTES "PUBLICATION" IN ELECTRONIC MEDIA?
Martin Blume
The American Physical Society

Just as the first automobiles evolved from buggies, but with internal combustion engines replacing horses, so too can we take the first steps toward the electronic world from print ideas.  Many of the questions we face today existed also in the pure print world and we can extract some guidance from our past (and, indeed, still existing) problems.

There are in fact two (or more) definitions of publication.  The first is a legal definition, at least in the United States.  In the print world, widespread dissemination of a preprint counts as "publication", insofar as timing for patent applications is concerned.  Our journal editors have not, however, regarded such preprints as previously published, and hence they can be considered for inclusion in our journals.  We have adopted the same policy for articles widely disseminated electronically. Those posted on an eprint server (e.g.  Paul Ginsparg's xxx at Los Alamos) are not considered editorially to have been Published (although they have, legally, been published - note the distinction of the two by capitalization or not of the initial P).  Similarly for posting by authors on their own or on an employer's web pages.  Indeed, the APS allows authors to submit their articles directly from xxx for publication in one of the Physical Reviews.  We also explicitly recognize the rights of authors to update their eprints after refereeing and to keep them available on the eprint server, with the journal Publication reference added.  Further, if an author refers to an eprint on the server such a reference will be allowed and a direct link to the eprint will be put in our online journals.  This follows our print policy of allowing authors to refer to preprints in a Published work.

So far so good. But the electronic world is of course not the same as the print one.  A published eprint could be made into a Published one simply by the designation of a peer reviewing body's approval of the article.  Such Publication creates a virtual journal - the article might still reside only on the server, but links to it from the "certifiers" define the journal.  We would not, in this case, consider the article for publication in one of our own journals. A related but different example would be a selection of articles in an eprint archive by an individual who picks out noteworthy (to him) works and who then marks them as significant. If the authors had not asked for such recognition we would probably consider those articles for Publication in our journals. It seems, then, that author intent is one key to Publication (as opposed to publication). A paper is considered  Published when the author submits it somewhere for Publication and it is accepted, but not necessarily when it is selected without action on the part of the author.

Our policies also put some weight on whether or not the published article has been peer reviewed, but this is not the only criterion in the published-Published question. In the print world conference proceedings often appear in book form, but the papers might not have been refereed. Most publishers of journals would not accept a paper appearing in such a book, although a longer version with greater, or at least different, content would be considered. I would expect to follow a similar policy for electronically published conference proceedings.

Of course many publishers follow different and in most cases more stringent definitions of prior publication. Some will not consider an article whose content has, for example, been highlighted in a press release or newspaper article, and others will require that an article which is available on an eprint server be withdrawn from the server before Publication. We have tried to follow definitions which allow widespread distribution, but not true duplicate Publication. The electronic world differs from the pure print world both qualitatively and quantitatively, but the former can take a cue from the latter.