Re: Author's final draft and citing

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:20:07 -0400

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Jean Kempf <Jean.Kempf_at_univ-lyon2.fr> wrote:

> Most authors neither have the time nor the secretaries or graduate
> assistant (welcome to the real world) to chase 1000s of citations
> they have great trouble gathering and keeping accurate in the first
> place (I'm thinking of books as well)

You don't chase thousands of citations. You only do the few keystrokes
it takes to complete the bibliographic information (if incomplete)
for those articles that (1) you are citing, and for which (2) you
only have access to an OA postprint, for which (3) the author has
not (yet) provided the full bibliographic information (journal,
year, vol, pp) but merely "in press" (most authors will provide
compete bibliographic information for their postprints as soon
as it is available)

Or you don't bother, and you resort to scholarship that is as sloppy
as that of the author (in not having bothered to provide updated
publishing information) and you too cite the work as "in press".

What is all this fuss? The postprint is deposited by the author
immediately upon acceptance. He then knows the journal name, at the
very least, and perhaps also the year. Once he knows the rest --
volume, issue, pp -- he adds that to his bibliographic metadata for
the OA postprint. That is simply good, natural scholarly practice
in the OA era (especially when institutional mandates are requiring
authors to deposit postprints and their bibliographic metadata for
performance review).

And if the author/scholar does not so this, then the user/scholar
can complete the bibliographic reference to the work he is about
to cite, by looking it up on the web. (Soon there will be robot
variants on ParaCite that will do this automatically anyway; probably
there already are.)

So what is the fuss about? This is simple evolving scholarly practise
in the OA era.

> It is also like retyping your papers with every computer change,

Updates of an author's own bibliographic metadata for his own
article? It seems to be that's as old as the hills. Authors have
been doing it in their CVs for yonks. Now their postprints in their
IRs and their bibliographic metadata are part of their online-era
CVs, and will probably be the source from which their CV hard-copies
and updates are generated.

For users, updating their bibliography collections is an ongoing
project in any event, but robots will help alert them if and when
fuller bibliographic information, corrections or updates become
available online.

Forget about thinking in terms of updating static local card
catalogues and think in terms of dynamic updates of a complete,
global OA corpus.

But before that, we need to have the Green OA content, of which this
global distributed database will consist. And continuing to think in
terms of obsolescent clerical practices from the paper-based non-OA
era simply serves to retard the growth of the optimal and the inevitable.

>> SH:
>> If the corrections were not incorporated in the author's last
>> draft, scrape them from the PDF proofs and convert them back to
>> text in the postprint. This is all just obvious scholarly practice
>> in the online era.
>
> "obvious"??? "online era" ??? I cannot believe a Steven Harnad could
> write such statement. . . (it sounds like making your computer
> work with a candle)

Nothing of the sort. It is the most natural thing in the world to update
one's drafts to incorporate corrections. Every serious scholar does it,
and will do it for their OA postprints, since they are the versions that
are most likely to be accessed by users.

>The solution to that HUGE HUGE headache created by GREEN OA ?

No, mandates Green OA is solving the real headache, which is not
page-spans or incomplete bibliographic metadata, but lack of access!

> GOLD OA pure and simple.

Green OA self-archiving can be, and is being, mandated by funders and
institutions. That can and will generate 100% OA.

Now tell be how to reach 100% GOLD OA instead? And do you propose
that we should wait, meanwhile, lest we occasionally run into
incomplete bibliographic metadata or sloppy or unpaginated postprints?

I'd rather have the OA content, now.

Meanwhile, I would be interested in Jean Kempf's formula and
timetable for reaching 100% Gold OA, if the formula and
timetable for reaching 100% Green OA gives him a headache.

My headache is from access-denial, now.

And I think the fastest and surest way to 100% OA is mandated
Green OA. And that if 100% Gold OA is ever eventually to happen
(as I think it will), I think mandated Green OA is likewise the
way to reach it.

Amen.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Sep 30 2008 - 22:22:37 BST