Re: use case: page based scholarly reference?

> On 10 Jun 2015, at 16:31 , Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com> wrote:
> 
> I just sent a separate reply to Ivan's post but in response to Robin's, I think it would be reasonable to forgo the requirement that this be practical in print until there is an easy way to hide the "works" like we often do with URLs today.
> 
> Especially in scholarly journals, the online article is now more often the version of record and although that is regrettably often a PDF today, HTML will ultimately win the day.

And there are signs for change. For example, [1] *is* the version of records, and the official bibtex record shows it (hence the fake page number I referred to). Although it is possible to download a PDF file, it is not the official record. It is definitely HTML first.

Another example is[2] on PlosOne. The core is clearly HTML, although it is a bit more convoluted than PeerJ: there is a way to download the PDF and, surprisingly, it is only on the place that I found the 'official' citation format[3] that also uses a fake page number (e115253).

Ie, there is a slimmer of hope that these things will change. The goal would be that I could get an offline version downloaded on my disk of both [1] and [2] with a click of a button: that is what epub+web should do…

Ivan

P.S. I have to say that PLOS is not a really good example for quality. I was shocked to see that, on [2], all the numbers in the text are… images! It looks horrible in my browser, it is bad in so many ways… Sigh...



[1] https://peerj.com/articles/cs-1/
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
[3] "Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, et al. (2014) Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115253. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115253"


> 
> --Bill K
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@w3.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2015 10:16 AM
> To: Ivan Herman; Tzviya Siegman; Dave Cramer; Bill Kasdorf
> Cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG
> Subject: Re: use case: page based scholarly reference?
> 
> On 10/06/2015 14:02 , Ivan Herman wrote:
>> 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…
> 
> One question I have reading this is about usability. Imagining some form of resilient linking is used (the example below is from Emphasis 2 [0] but others tend to be the same), if I wanted to anchor a link to a paragraph I'd end up with something that looked like:
> 
>   D. Ahut, et al., “Sustainable Critical Avalanches of Alpine Fauna,”
> Cryptozoology, vol. 42, #p[MMTMMT],h[BcdTcg,1], Mar. 1977
> 
> The "#p[MMTMMT],h[BcdTcg,1]" bit can replace pages (you can also do ranges with it) and so long as you're in a digital context in which it is presumably clickable it's fine; but when it shows up in print as it invariably will, well, I'd hate to have to type that back in.
> 
> Is this something that should be a consideration, or should references from print to digital be largely considered hopeless anyway (since in practice you just search for the paper's title)?
> 
> [0] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source/
> 
> --
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon


----
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