San Diego

Members of the Optical Society of America (OSA) voted last week not to merge with the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), ending months of contentious campaigning at the two societies.

The result was announced last week at the society's annual meeting in Santa Clara, California. SPIE had voted by mail earlier in the summer, with the result to be announced on Tuesday of this week. But the response from the OSA membership kills the merger, which was first mooted in early 1998.

OSA's leadership had sought the merger to create a more powerful organization. But criticism of the merger proposal grew as vocal dissidents expressed concerns that the research-orientated OSA might be threatened by SPIE and its focus on applied research (see Nature 398, 547; 1999).

The OSA voted against the merger by 51 per cent (2,551 votes) to 49 per cent (2,420 votes). A two-thirds majority of voting members was needed to approve the merger.

”The members have spoken,” said Anthony E. Siegman, OSA's president and a leading proponent of the merger. “In their view, a merger of OSA and SPIE is not in the best interests of the society at this time.”

Daniel V. F. James, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a critic of the merger proposal, said of the vote: “We are happy; it was the correct decision.”