OBSTACLES ENCOUNTERED IN PUBLISHING THE FINDINGS AS WELL AS AFTERWARDS.
One angry editor figured out the post office we used in Minnesota was not far from the University of North Dakota, and he surmised that the culprits must be from that institution. He notified the chairman of the psychology department, asking him if he or the ethics committee had approved such a study, threatening that it was perhaps fitting that the entire department suffer the punishment of not having their future work published. At that time (1978), there was no ethics approval that social scientists needed before doing their studies, something that was to be mandated later. Before launching the study, we had given the chair a description of our study, which made clear that we would obtain the approval of the original authors and had no intention to republish the papers. We explained that we were not obtaining the approval of the journal editors because doing so might compromise the study.