[r-t] 1-part tenors together atw compositions of 23-splicedmajor

[Alexander Holroyd]

Fantastic stuff, Mark.  Need to take time to study this properly...

On Thu, 3 Dec 2015, Philip Earis wrote:

> On the more general point, I must admit I'm a bit puzzled by the attitude to 
> keep compositions secret until they've been pealed. Timely publishing is 
> beneficial to a field - this is certainly the case in science, where 
> publishing is very well established, and I feel applies equally to ringing.

I think a composer absolutely has the right to keep things secret until 
they are rung if they want to, and being in the first peal of something is 
perhaps a nice (optional) perk.  However, I do think ringing would benefit 
if we tried to move the general expectation away from the idea that this 
is the norm.

It is interesting that attitudes in science seem to have changed quite 
recently (at least in maths).  It used to be common for a paper to be kept 
secret, or somewhat secret, until it had been peer reviewed and published 
by a journal.  These days it is much more common for it to be made public 
as a preprint as soon as it is written.  arxiv.org provides a central 
repository for preprints, and also provides unfakeable date stamps, which 
allays most concerns about priority.

This change has definitely been a beneficial one overall.