The Optical Society Oral History Project Interview with ... - OSA

Interview with Dr. Anthony Siegman, May 5, 2008 27
This was an embarrassing—not embarrassing, but it was a difficult thing for him in a way
because this was going to become something that the OSA had to sell to its members, and
he was the next in line for president. The election would be held the year I was president.
Eriich was in this difficult position of sincerely not believing in it, but not at the same
time trying not to stand in the way. So this became, as you may know, a very
controversial issue. There were “old timers” in the OSA and some new-timers, younger
timers who looked down on SPIE, I think it's fair to say. SPIE is not a society in which
the primary focus is on refereed or peer reviewed work. Rather they attempt to organize
meetings quickly, they're productive, get books out. They put out a meetings proceeding
a day all year long. They put out three hundred to three hundred and fifty volumes of
meetings proceedings a year.
They have a mailing list of—at the time, 250,000 names, even though they only have
about twelve thousand members. And I learned from university librarians, at the time at
least, that their proceedings, even though they were totally un-refereed and had a lot of
what I think it would be fair to characterize as somewhat mediocre stuff, were extremely
popular with industry in the Stanford area, for example, and students as well. The
industrial people would say, “These proceedings are very timely, up to date, they're very
useful to us. Just give them to us, don't worry about the peer review, and we'll sort out
what we like.” And that was a very different ethos from OSA in which I think around 65
percent of the membership is Ph.D.s, and, I would really emphasize, peer-reviewed
journals and peer-reviewed meetings are the core of what OSA does.