Editor's note

In this issue of the SPMC Journal of Health Care Services, we reproduce an unabridged version of the article “Report of a case of bronchopneumonia without cough secondary to influenza” by Juan Belisario (1894-1963), who was a resident physician in Davao Public Hospital (the present-day SPMC) in 1927. We obtained a digitized copy of the article from a compilation in Internet Archive www.archive.org, an Internet-based non-profit library. This online library collects published works—including publicly available books and other printed texts—and makes them available in digital formats.

The reproduction of this 90-year-old article is a secondary publication. This case report was first published in a publicly available Philippine government report—the Monthly Bulletin of the Philippine Health Service Vol VII No 12, pp. 687-690, December 1927. In order to preserve the original layout and typesetting of the article, we reproduce the entire article here as four images saved in JPG format from the PDF file as uploaded by the University of Michigan, the digitizing sponsor and contributor of the archived document.

Respect for intellectual property is one value that our publication upholds, and our editorial staff took due diligence to ensure that no copyright infringement has occurred in the republication of this article. To obtain clearance for this republication, we communicated with Internet Archive to ask about their prescribed republication procedure. We were referred to the website’s Terms of Use section, which stipulates that Internet Archive should be listed as a resource in projects that use any content from its collections. We then communicated with the University of Michigan, the digitizing sponsor of the compilation in Internet Archive, to request permission to use their digitized version of the article. Their Copyright Specialist told us that the University of Michigan cannot grant or deny permission to use the digitized article because the university does not hold copyright in the article and would not claim copyright in the digital image of the work.

As published in December 1927, this article did not bear any copyright notice, which usually consists of the word ‘Copyright’ or the copyright symbol ©, the name of the copyright owner, and the year of its first publication. Our lawyer, Danilo Cullio, pointed out the provision in the present Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines (Republic Act 8293), which states that no copyright subsists in any work of the government. This article, which was published in a government report, is considered ‘work of the government.’ It may be republished to serve its purpose. We communicated with Juan Belisario’s grandson, Manuel Belisario, about this republication project, and he agreed to this republication and signed a publication agreement to represent his grandfather as the author of this work.

We commissioned Michael Timajo to write a statement about the statutory compliance of this republication. His rundown of relevant past and current legislations on intellectual property, specially hinged on copyright acquisition, attribution and consent, can be found next to the republished case report. Finally, we commissioned Eugene Barinaga to write about why this case report is important to us today, and on what possible lessons we can learn from this 1927 document. This case report is an elegant piece of work and a beautiful story about how health care used to be simple yet effective. We hope you enjoy reading it.

Alvin S Concha
Jesse Jay L Baula