Editorial Preface: Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles

This Notice is an Editorial Preface for the Note authored by X. Steve Yao and Lianshan Yan entitled "Comments on 'Compact first-order polarization mode dispersion compensator based on birefringent crystals,' by Yang Chang-Xi et al., in Chinese Physics Letters, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 326-328, 2004." After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of the paper by Yang Chang-Xi et al., by a duly constituted committee, this paper has been found to be in violation IEEE's Publication Principles. This paper contains essentially a duplication of the results from a paper [L. Yan, C. Yeh, G. Yang, L. Lin, Z. Chen, Y.Q. Shi, A.E. Willner, and X.S. Yao, "Programmable group delay module using binary polarization switching," J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 21, no. 7, pp. 1676-1684, Jul. 2003]. There was no reference by the offending paper to the earlier work published in JLT, and the device described in this paper was described as new. In this paper, the only apparent descriptive difference from the device published in JLT was considered not technically crucial; the six crystal stages are in a length-decreasing arrangement with respect to the light versus the length-increasing arrangement published in JLT. The Note by Yao and Yan in this issue comprehensively identifies a number of instances in the offending paper where the device concepts and construction are identical to those in the JLT article. Due to the nature of this violation, all reasonable effort should be made to reference not the offending paper, but to the work of L. Yan, et al., as the source of the original journal description of the device concepts, implementation, and results.