On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Arif Jinha <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear friends,
we need to officially create an accepted and updated citation style.
It is not clear who "we" are, nor why we need to create a  new citation style.
This is a Forum for the discussion of strategy and policy for generating Open
Access.
What has changed for bibliographic citation format, apart from the need to add
URLs (preferably enduring ones) for accessible copies of cited articles? The
usual author(s), date, title, journal, volume, issue, page remain as always
(except for journals with no issue or no pages).
However, print publication has a production and preservational value
that
ought to be preserved. Â
Especially while it still exists in the vast majority of journals!
Â
A publisher may easily deliver their highest-quality
journals in print, while publishing the same articles online in OA.
So add the URL and DOI.
* Author(s) name
* Publication date
* Title
* Source (magazine, journal, etc. name)
* Volume & issue number
* Page number(s) (if available)
* Date you accessed the information
* URL
Â
They just need the right business model to accomplish this. Â
I don't understand. Virtually all the major journals already have an online
version. The citation is the same, except that the online version has a DOI.
(What has this to do with business model, and whose?)
Â
By putting the
resources into high-quality print publication sends a message that
these
articles have value, the writing, copy-editing and print
presentations give
greater gravitas and impact to the content. Â
Who is sending messages to whom? Researchers are trying (as always) to publish
in the highest quality journal suitable for their work.
What does this have to do with citation style? (Or with OA?)
Â
For print publications, I
suggest maintaining the geographical information about the
publisher,
because locality is still important to culture, and thus the culture
of
publishing houses in different regions. Â
Good advice. But why is this being told to an OA discussion list?
Â
When something is in print, people
take in the whole of the work. Â When it is electronic, people tend
to sift
for data or even just the bits they need to reference to back up
their
analysis. Â The second route is pragmatic insofar as it gets work
done but
the time taken to read the whole of the work gives incentive to
digest
information in a more reflective fashion. Â Such considerations
reflexively
affect the culture of research, and beg of the need for quality and
contemplation of the ideas - not just the bits of information that
are often
grabbed and embedded in the polemics of research agendas.
Yes, but what is the relevance of this to the American Scientist Open Access
Forum, which is devoted to OA, and in particular (since about 2006), to the
discussion of practical policies and strategies for increasing the provision of
OA worldwide?Â
A new citation style for online articles would include author-date,
article
and journal title, DOI, and link to the OA version of an article if
available, and if not to the abstract. Â
Yes, and if you look at the APA and Chicago and other style manuals, I believe
you will find that they have already been recommending this for a number of
years now.
Â
This convention would favour OAÂ versions.
Favour? If there is an OA version, and it is linked with the citation (and the
user does not have licensed access to the publisher's version of record) then
the OA link will certainly favour accessing the OA version.
But the OA problem is not the articles that have been made OA, but the articles
that have not been made OA.
Â
There should be a limit on characters, this would encourage
concise titles (short versions if necessary) and disqualify the
pasting of
lengthy website addresses.
There are ways of shortening long URLs (e.g., bit/ly, but do we want URLs
hostage to a commercial compression service?). It is premature for URL length to
be a rigid citation criterion while most articles are not yet OA. Beggars can't
be choosers...
 Citation for printed works should be used
authentically, that is when the author is getting the information
from the
hard copy, and therein should include geographical location. Â In
all the
citation style should appropriately and authentically reflect the
research
to publication process, whilst being convenient to the reader in
their
study.
This is worthy general citation best-practice advice, but why is it being posted
in this Forum?
You might try the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/about
?hl=en
Stevan Harnad Â
many thanks for your consideration and time,
Arif Jinha, MA
Wakefield, QC
Canada
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew A. Adams" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: Is a Different OA Strategy Needed for Social Sciences
and
Humanities? (No)
On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Gu???don 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            [email protected]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, Â and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan    http://www.a-cubed.info/
