I also add my congratulations.
The FAQ I maintain on "powerlines and cancer" was also solicited by a medical
journal. It just went out in final form a month ago, and should appear this
summer.
A number of issues
*Copyright:
The journal will own the copyright, I didn't have a choice there, its standard
practice with all the journals I publish in. As author, I retain a "right to
use the material" as long as I identify the source. There is little potential
conflict, because I had to do a fairly extensive rewrite to conform to journal
standards, and I had to cut out a lot of material.
When the paper is out I will modify the copyright statement in the FAQ to
directly cite the journal article as a source for some of the material.
Should be very interesting to see what happens to a CD-ROM publisher who
reprints without permission an FAQ that is copyrighted in part by a major
publishing house.
* Authorship
I wrote most (about 80%) of the FAQ. The other major contributor (10-15%) I
offered co-authorship to -- he accepted and made major contributions to the
rewrite. For the other FAQ contributors, I used no verbatim text from those
parts of the FAQ in the journal article. I also include and acknowledgement
(see below). This could be a major problem for some FAQ sheets.
* Modifications
In addition to the modifications insisted on by the journal format, I added
formatting, tables, and all the sorts of things that you can't do in straight
ASCII text. I also had to clean up the writing style quite a bit. My FAQ was
already "referenced", so that was not an issue.
* Pushing net access
After much thought I settled on the following:
-----
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This review draws heavily on an electronic FAQ (Frequency Asked Questions)
document called "Powerlines & Cancer FAQs" which J. Moulder maintains in the
USENET newsgroup called "sci.med.physics". We would like to acknowledge the
many readers of sci.med.physics who have contributed suggestions, comments and
corrections to the FAQ sheet. The current version of "Powerlines & Cancer
FAQs" can be found on USENET or obtained by FTP, e-mail, Gopher or World Wide
Web from any of the many sites that archive USENET FAQ sheets.
----------
Note that this give no precise access instructions. I had originally given
precise directions to rtfm and the WWW site (including URLs). But then I
started to worry whether these would be the same several years from now and
settled on the above rather vague directions.
* Why publish it
For me this is no issue. Like most academics I write for a living. The FAQ
sheet is seen by the University as an eccentric hobby, but the published
version is a "real publication".
Money is also not an issue, because medical journals pay little or nothing.
It's also nice to see your name in print (:
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