> On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Gu??on wrote: >> most SSH journals would not accept the kind of referencing he >> suggests. Most journals, in fact, impose their citation and quotation >> referencing styles. As they now also accept electronic references, it >> leads to what I said: references to repository articles are beginning >> to appear in significant numbers. This raise a new question, that of >> quality control of the versions in the repositories, but that can be >> solved too. It is therefore true that the lack of reliable pagination >> is probably a fading inconvenience. Stevan Harnad replied: > Yes, quote-location convention-updating is a minor and fading > inconvenience. But not because we need (or are providing) peer review > for already peer-reviewed author drafts, just so that quotes can have > page numbers! There are simple ways to accomplish that. And what is > cited is the canonical published version of record, not the specific > document one actually accessed. (I don't cite a photocopy of an > article, I cite the article -- journal, title, date, volume, > page-span.) If a journal copy-editor, unsatisfied with the > section-heading and paragraph number, insists on page numbers for the > quotes, they can go look them up (when they look up the quote itself, > whose wording, after all, even more important to get right than its > pagination....)
I would go even further than Stevan and say that practically (not in the minds of editors, but as a matter of practical usage fo researchers, not librarians, not editors, not bibliometricists) even paragrph numbering is pointless and unncessary in the new world of OA, if we ever reach it. If one has access to an electronic version of a paper referenced, then quotes or keywords can be searched for in the accesible electronic version. In computer science the concept of pages has been done away with in a number of new journals. Articles are referenced by article number within volume (i.e. year of publication). We are getting caght in all these gutenberg-era traps distracting us from providing the most important thing: access to the information. Everything else is simply a matter of having the proper tools available to make use of that access. We used to worry about findability - Google Scholar pretty much solves that one. If one has even a half-decent reference with author name(s)/title and journal name, then Google scholar will find it if it can be crawled. We used to worry about finding an element within an article. Syntactic search within an article with appropriately chosen words can not only solve that, but also show where else in the same paper the same concepts were addressed. All we're missing is the access and that is within our grasp if we as a community would stop worrying about all these mythical problems and deposit. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
