RE: use case: page based scholarly reference?

Two comments.

--This is another example of why I think our fragment identification should align with what Annotations does. IMO the footnotes and citations you refer to are forms of annotations.

--This is a HUGE issue in scholarly publishing because gazillions of citations and footnotes (or at least a gazillion and a half) are issued virtually daily (especially if you also count cross references and index locators in books). Yes, citation of pages is important, but only because there is no better stable way to identify what is being cited. Citing the page is crude and approximate ("somewhere between the start of this page and end of this page you will find what I'm referring to") but it's the only thing available (except in reference and legal publications that number sections and paragraphs--which are still approximate, just less so). If we can come up with a solution it will be a huge win for scholarship.

--Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2015 8:03 AM
To: Tzviya Siegman; Dave Cramer; Bill Kasdorf
Cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: use case: page based scholarly reference?

Based on the scholarly publishing topic of the last telco, I am wondering how to formalize a requirement and under which category does it belong…

In scholarly publishing precise (scholarly) reference is a must. This, as of today, usually includes references to page numbers. This can take specific formats, eg,

- In some areas and under the reference format required by some journals, a reference to an article includes a page number. E.g.,

	A. Evans, et al., “3D graphics on the web: A survey,” Computers & Graphics, vol. 41, pp. 43–61, Jun. 2014.


- In humanities, when quoting from a book, a reference (often in a footnote) includes a page number:

 D. Heater: World Citizenship and Government. Macmillan Press, London, 1996. 12-13.

One of the reasons, I guess, why publisher still offer a PDF format for their downloads is, I guess, because the page numbers become fixed relative to a journal or a proceedings, even if these latter practically never hit anyone's bookshelf.

This is so deeply structured in scholarly references, that fully online publisher have to cheat with this. Eg, PeerJ has the article[1]; one can download, from the site, a BiBTeX reference for the paper, to be used by others, and this is of the form (I removed details):

@article{10.7717/peerj-cs.1,
 title = {Achieving ...},
 author = {Starr, Joan and ...},
 year = {2015},
 month = {5},
 volume = {1},
 pages = {e1},
 journal = {PeerJ Computer Science},
 issn = {2376-5992},
 url = {https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1},

 doi = {10.7717/peerj-cs.1}
}

Note the phony 'e1' page identification.

I am not sure what this translates into in a requirement for the identification part, namely that 'reasonable' units within the publication should have an easily identifiable URL, or URL structure (note that the examples above actually define ranges and not only one page). This may be a page but that is a fluid notion in this case, that may not be appropriate for scholarly purposes. But I am a bit uncertain how to formulate it before putting it into the use case directory…

WDYT?

Ivan



[1] https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1




----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2015 14:28:41 UTC