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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
in 1953, five years after the Institute was founded. He also established a policy whereby
Member Societies had the opportunity to act as publishers of IIW books of particular interest
to them. Parsloe’s involvement in publishing and documenting work continued when he
became the joint editor in chief of
Welding in the World
(WiW) when it was first published
in 1962.
2
The journal was bilingual, both English and French, with Mr André Leroy of
the French Institut de Soudure contributing equally as the publication coordinator. From a
wider perspective
IIW did take a lead later in publishing important stand-alone documents
such as
Guidance on Fitness for Purpose
, the first comprehensive and truly international
guidance document on this topic, which was issued in 1992.
3
The introduction ofWiWby IIWwas to promote and disseminate state-
of-the-art reports of IIW’s Commissions that were fundamental in advancing
the science of welding and joining, covering technology, health and safety,
education and training, all of which were important in the technical progress
of both developed and developing nations. The content of WiW
,
primarily,
consisted of selected papers presented at Working Group meetings which
had been approved by Working Groups for publication. These papers were
then edited by the Secretariat for inclusion in the journal.
4
IIW benefited
substantially from the sales of WiW as a result and, in order to increase sales
further, it was decided at the 1983 Annual Assembly held in Trondheim,
Norway not to publish in-house but to engage Pergamon Press to take over
publication of the journal.
In 1992 Pergamon Press was bought out by another
academic publisher, Elsevier, which continued publishing WiW
until 1998 when they were to inform IIW that they would no longer
be publishing IIW’s journal. This may have been due in part to
the fact that IIW had squeezed extra royalties out of an agreement
with Elsevier a few years earlier in 1996. Nevertheless, it was an
interesting turn of events since, earlier that year, Mr David Reynolds
(Canada) had suggested that other means of producing the journal
should be considered, including electronic publishing on IIW’s
website or distribution as CD-ROMs. Some debate ensued at the
Technical Committee on the merits of doing so but it was eventually decided to continue
with the printed version, mainly because of the credibility and visibility that it provided
for IIW, as well as being a source of citation for other authoritative documents or scientific
papers.
5
In this respect Working Group
Publications
had also discussed with Elsevier, in
1997, the conditions for inclusion in a citation index. These discussions, evidently, didn’t
achieve any finality due to Elsevier’s declining interest in publishing WiW
.
6
As a result of
Elsevier’s decision it was then decided that the IIW Secretariat would take full responsibility