The big issue of recent weeks has been one of copyright. 
The net surely clouds this business of 'who owns' the work that is put up on the Net. In the old days it was pretty simple. Stealing a person's work was stealing their right to claim any remuneration from it. Now, it is not so simple. If you take a graphic or an article from the web, it is still there in the original, for all to point to. 

Where this affects the prose section is this. In the past the average publisher has 'shrugged off' publication on the web. Now, many people, are beginning to see (at last) that web publication is real publication. This has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It would be no longer possible to submit, say, a poem, as 'hitherto unpublished work' but the poem would be more liable to predation than it would be otherwise. 

Seems to me that where, for example, in an echo, I post a poem for people to comment on, it is both dated, and witnessed as being mine.  Copyright (the right to consider myself the author of this work) is thereby established. (Lets not think about someone posting the work of someone else as their own. I've seen it happen twice in the past five years, and tend to keep it in the family: and lets ignore a 'rewrite, inspired by' - those areas are foggy and complicated. 

Now. If we're going to say that Web publication is true publication, we're looking at a situation not too different from that in the commercial world. There's the do it yourself poem, the collection of incredibly soppy love poetry publication and there's the kind of thing Nexus does. Which is, a poem is submitted (or requested) just as it would be in the publishing world. It is examined and either 'goes' or it does not. 

Two things are required then. One is to make that publication so 
distinctive that it can't be forged, even if it is imitated. The second 
is to make it so prestigious that one could add the note to one's 
submissions to other places "I've been published on Nexus" could be as important a recommendation as "I've a column in the Tattler" or "regularly published in the NZ listener. 

We'll never be able to stop people ambling off with copies of things they like. They do it from libraries and Waiting Rooms all the time. So long as they do it for their own pleasure that's traditionally understood if officially frowned on. There are very specific rules for how much of a published work may be copied and under what circumstances, when it comes to hard copy. Those guidelines are not so well known or observed on the web. Our own intentions are to be more, rather than less stringent about our own copyright permissions, and to try to make sure that our readers are aware that the copyright is in place and taken seriously.

In other words, we have to look after and protect all our contributors, and make sure that their careers don't suffer by their trust in us. 

Alys 
editor@nexus.org.nz 
reprinted from the 'Nexus Newsletter'