Originally Posted by bwilson4web

Hi,

What are the limits to copyright of a critical reviewer of a report?

I am thinking about sharing my critique of "Hybrid vehicles: a temporary step" (Chanaron, Teske, 2007) with our community. But I'm not interested in violating copyright nor the guidelines of GreenHybrid.com.

My thinking is I would quote the relevant portions of the report with my critique. Unfortunately, this assumes the parts I left out are by default, "OK" when in fact, they may have redeeming elements or failings that I didn't see. To me, over-quoting is preferable because it lets third parties critique the critic, a good thing. I would prefer to start with the whole report, add my comments and then remove the uninteresting parts.

The other issue is staying within the guidelines of GreenHybrid.com. I do not know the authors and have no personal interest in them. However, the work they published (and I bought for $40) has a number of significant errors, misleading statements. Worse, they failed to address, much less resolve, conflicting facts and data. It has mistakes that need to be corrected.

There is a technical issue of how large a posting can be in GreenHybrid.com. I'm not sure how large a posting can be but recently hit a 5,000 character limit on an e-mail. If I have to, I could probably write up my critique as a word or RTF text document and post it as an attachment. Alternatively, I could post the report as a series of postings in one thread by element. This would avoid the character count limit, organize the commentary yet keep everything together. The source or first posting would be a cover note that is a synthesis of the introduction and conclusions. To be fair, I would e-mail my critique to the authors and suggest we discuss this here.

I don't want to stretch the rules of the road and cause GreenHybrid to be seen as a 'flame war' haven. Rather, I want to make sure we preserve our reputation as a fair place for serious people. Sad to say but the 'sound machine' that echoes bad reports has already started to pickup not the original report but the inflated "sales" descriptions of the report. Only by addressing the report directly do we have the answers to "the buzz."

Does this approach make sense? Is there a better way? Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks,
Bob Wilson

ps. Now if we could just charge the authors $10 to read my critique . . . <smiles>