Publications in ImageJ proceedings not citable?

[ericbarnhill]

I've been exchanging communication with a journal called Computers in  
Biology and Medicine regarding an upcoming publication of theirs. The  
details of the dispute are not of interest to this list, but the  
response of the journal might be. I'll write one paragraph to describe  
the situation, and then one paragraph on what I think is of interest.

Last year I had a submission accepted to the ImageJ Luxembourg  
conference and published in the proceedings entitled "MRE-J: A Novel  
Pipeline For Magnetic Resonance Elastography Image Processing Using  
ImageJ and Apache Commons-Math" which may ring a bell if you have  
looked through those proceedings. It came to my attention last week  
that there is an article in proof in Computers in Biology and Medicine  
by Xiang et al called "MREJ: Elastography reconstruction on ImageJ".  
My software, as described in the proceedings, offered a choice of  
inversion algorithms in conjunction with ImageJ's native processing  
tools to allow the user to compare the results of various approaches  
to inversion. Xiang et al's code offers a choice of inversion  
algorithms in conjunction with ImageJ's native processing tools to  
allow the user to compare the results of various approaches to  
inversion. My software came bundled with Apache commons-math 3.3.0,  
which I thought was a reasonably unusual choice for an ImageJ plugin  
since I see JAMA and JScience more commonly (and if I had to do it  
over again I would just call Scilab!). The new software, though they  
did not mention it in the article, also comes bundled with Apache  
commons-math 3.3.0 . They do some things differently so there is  
certainly room for both of us - however I thought that they should  
include a citation to my previous work, and consider changing the name  
to avoid confusion in our small world.

The editor of the journal disagrees:

"[The proceedings] is listed as a poster Abstract for the ImageJ  
Conference series  
(http://imagejconf.tudor.lu/program/poster/eric_barnhill1618413619)  
without a date of publication or citation information provided...these  
abstracts of Dr. Barnhill et al. describe in general terms some  
software that the authors have developed for magnetic resonance  
elastography. Dr. Xiang et al. describe their work in a full length  
peer-reviewed scientific paper with software provided. They don't cite  
the abstract shown above of Dr. Barnhill et al., but it does not come  
up in Google searches by using keywords, and referencing information  
is not provided with the online abstract for citation. So it is  
understandable that it is not listed in the references of the article  
by Dr. Xiang et al."

Perhaps now you see what I think is of interest to the community. As  
it stands, submission to an ImageJ proceeding is apparently not  
sufficient to describe and protect a new plugin, due to a lack of  
appropriate referencing information. Nor according to this editor do  
the results come up in academic searches on the relevant keywords.

I was disappointed by this. We have been using our MRE-J package to  
produce publishable results since last spring. At that time it was  
suggested to me by my advisors to quickly publish in SPIE or IEEE to  
protect the name and territory of the software. I thought I had this  
situation handled by publishing in the ImageJ Proceedings. Apparently  
I didn't.

I am wondering whether other developers agree with the editor that  
publishing in the ImageJ conference proceedings is not sufficient to  
warrant citation by derivative work? I am also wondering whether the  
proceedings of the next conference could somehow be made available in  
a way that makes the submissions easier to cite and find in academic  
searches?

-Eric

---
Eric Barnhill
Clinical Research Imaging Centre
The University of Edinburgh

--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html

[Burger Wilhelm]

Dear Eric,

this is strange, but while I am unable to judge the originality of these publications I just want to mention that the choice of the Apache Commons-Math library is not an unlikely coincidence but quite reasonable, since it is considerably richer and better maintained than JAMA, for example. For this reason we also have recently converted all our software on www.imagingbook.com to Commons-Math.

--Wilhelm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ImageJ Interest Group [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
> Eric Barnhill
> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 12:40 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Publications in ImageJ proceedings not citable?
>
> I've been exchanging communication with a journal called Computers in
> Biology and Medicine regarding an upcoming publication of theirs. The
> details of the dispute are not of interest to this list, but the
> response of the journal might be. I'll write one paragraph to describe
> the situation, and then one paragraph on what I think is of interest.
>
> Last year I had a submission accepted to the ImageJ Luxembourg
> conference and published in the proceedings entitled "MRE-J: A Novel
> Pipeline For Magnetic Resonance Elastography Image Processing Using
> ImageJ and Apache Commons-Math" which may ring a bell if you have
> looked through those proceedings. It came to my attention last week
> that there is an article in proof in Computers in Biology and Medicine
> by Xiang et al called "MREJ: Elastography reconstruction on ImageJ".
> My software, as described in the proceedings, offered a choice of
> inversion algorithms in conjunction with ImageJ's native processing
> tools to allow the user to compare the results of various approaches
> to inversion. Xiang et al's code offers a choice of inversion
> algorithms in conjunction with ImageJ's native processing tools to
> allow the user to compare the results of various approaches to
> inversion. My software came bundled with Apache commons-math 3.3.0,
> which I thought was a reasonably unusual choice for an ImageJ plugin
> since I see JAMA and JScience more commonly (and if I had to do it
> over again I would just call Scilab!). The new software, though they
> did not mention it in the article, also comes bundled with Apache
> commons-math 3.3.0 . They do some things differently so there is
> certainly room for both of us - however I thought that they should
> include a citation to my previous work, and consider changing the name
> to avoid confusion in our small world.
>
> The editor of the journal disagrees:
>
> "[The proceedings] is listed as a poster Abstract for the ImageJ
> Conference series
> (http://imagejconf.tudor.lu/program/poster/eric_barnhill1618413619)
> without a date of publication or citation information provided...these
> abstracts of Dr. Barnhill et al. describe in general terms some
> software that the authors have developed for magnetic resonance
> elastography. Dr. Xiang et al. describe their work in a full length
> peer-reviewed scientific paper with software provided. They don't cite
> the abstract shown above of Dr. Barnhill et al., but it does not come
> up in Google searches by using keywords, and referencing information
> is not provided with the online abstract for citation. So it is
> understandable that it is not listed in the references of the article
> by Dr. Xiang et al."
>
> Perhaps now you see what I think is of interest to the community. As
> it stands, submission to an ImageJ proceeding is apparently not
> sufficient to describe and protect a new plugin, due to a lack of
> appropriate referencing information. Nor according to this editor do
> the results come up in academic searches on the relevant keywords.
>
> I was disappointed by this. We have been using our MRE-J package to
> produce publishable results since last spring. At that time it was
> suggested to me by my advisors to quickly publish in SPIE or IEEE to
> protect the name and territory of the software. I thought I had this
> situation handled by publishing in the ImageJ Proceedings. Apparently
> I didn't.
>
> I am wondering whether other developers agree with the editor that
> publishing in the ImageJ conference proceedings is not sufficient to
> warrant citation by derivative work? I am also wondering whether the
> proceedings of the next conference could somehow be made available in
> a way that makes the submissions easier to cite and find in academic
> searches?
>
> -Eric
>
> ---
> Eric Barnhill
> Clinical Research Imaging Centre
> The University of Edinburgh
>
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
> --
> ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html

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ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html

[Tiago Ferreira-2]

Dear Eric,

I sympathize with your frustration.

On 2013.04.29, at 06:39 , Eric Barnhill wrote:
> I am also wondering whether the proceedings of the next conference could somehow
> be made available in a way that makes the submissions easier to cite and find in
> academic searches?

Don't know how others feel about it, but just wanted to mention that Faculty of
1000 would allow attendees to submit their posters/slides to F1000Posters[1]. A
similar repository would be figshare[2], that as far far as I can tell does not
require pre-approval by invited experts in the field.

While implementing the idea of open notebook science both the repositories seem
to provide a permanent and citable record for unpublished research, although
journals seem to have different opinions on this[3]

[1] http://f1000.com/posters
[2] http://figshare.com/
[3] http://f1000.com/posters/journalresponses

Please note I'm not affiliated to f1000 or figshare

-tiago

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