In any symposium with as many papers as this one, there are bound to be some very good papers, and some not-so-good papers. Thursday was the day I saw several not-so-good ones. The problem was a common one: the author gives a paper not realizing that essentially the same paper was given at this conference several years ago by someone else. It’s inevitable, given that we have now over 650 papers published in the proceedings of the various conferences of this symposium, and the total number of papers published over the years just at this symposium has to be approaching 10,000. It’s inevitable, but still it should be rare. Given that good on-line search tools are now available on the SPIE website, it is usually not that hard to find and read previous papers on the same topic as one’s current work. The number of redundant papers should be much smaller than it currently is, so I suspect that most authors (and I am sometimes guilty here as well) are being lazy and not doing the literature search that is demanded of anyone that wants to publish a good paper.

This year, I had to do something I have never done before – I withdrew my paper from the conference at the last minute. It was a poster paper, so the disruption to the conference was minimal. Still, I am disappointed in myself. I think many authors have faced similar dilemmas: when submitting an abstract in August, predict what data will be available and what work can be done by the next February. It’s easy to guess wrong, and often the final paper is much different from what was envisioned (and described) in the original abstract. For me, the problem was this: I didn’t do the work required to make this paper sufficiently distinct from a previous publication on which this one was to be based. Such incremental papers are common, and it is the responsibility of the author to ensure that there is enough new to justify an additional publication. I could have published something that was just a little different from my past paper, but I knew I would have been wasting the time of any potential reader. Pulling a paper at the last minute is not good, but publishing a paper that doesn’t deserve to be published is far worse.

The evening ended for me on a very special note – good, but sad. About 50 lithographers gathered at Gordon Biersch and at 9pm raised a glass of beer in honor of Jeff Byers. At many other restaurants and bars around town, other lithographers were doing the same thing. We miss you Jeff – you are gone but not forgotten.