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2nd edition,1st printing |
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2nd edition,2nd-4th printings |
If there is one piece of advice I would give a prospective author, it is to have a lawyer look over the contract before you sign. Always have a lawyer check any contract.
There are other lessons I have learned which I would like to share. Ethical and legal issues are very different things. People can get away with doing things that are completely unethical because there might not be laws covering that issue. There are many things that we hold dear in science. The pursuit of truth is central. Honesty and integrity in reporting results are vital. Giving correct attribution is paramount. It would be unethical to put a friend's name on a research journal article if that friend did not contribute. A patent will be ruled invalid if a listed inventor did not contribute to the invention. In the latter case, there are laws about patents. In the former case, it would not be illegal to list a false author on a journal paper, although it would certainly be considered unethical. We assume that when we walk into a bookstore and see a book on a shelf listing several authors, that those are the people who wrote the book. In America, we have come to accept these things as standard. We do not usually wonder if one of the listed authors was merely a friend of the publisher, who the publisher was doing some favor for by putting the friend’s name on one of their books.
If you walked into a bookstore and you saw a book on the shelf which was a new edition of Hamlet, and you saw the authors listed as Bruce Seiger and William Shakespeare (where Bruce Seiger was allowed to change Act 2), you would know it was a scam. On less famous books, we cannot be sure. We have to trust. Trust is what A.K. Peters has violated, and their actions throw the integrity of scientific publishing into question.
I won’t let that happen.