Re: Citing academic papers in RefSpec documents

> On 12 Nov 2019, at 6:37 am, Tobie Langel <tobie.langel@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2019, at 20:16, Antonin Delpeuch wrote:
>> I would like to cite academic papers in a RefSpec document. I could use
>> the existing citation system but it seems to be geared towards citing
>> other specs only.
>> 
>> The localBiblio option lets us define custom references but its fields
>> follow SpecRef's format, which is again designed to cite specs and not
>> other things. For instance, academic papers tend to have a DOI (Digital
>> Object Identifier) and I would like to include that in the citation as
>> it is common practice.
> 
> Academic papers are increasingly cited in specs, notably on topics such as privacy and security.
> 
> I’d be more than happy to make sure this is done properly by adding the relevant fields to the specref data model.
> 
> On the presentation side, this will have to be handled by ReSpec and Bikeshed.
> 
> What data would you need, specifically, and what would the presentation look like?


From [1]:

"Crossref is a database of about 100 million papers, identified by their Digital Object Identifier (DOI). It provides an HTTP API which can be used to search for papers and retrieve their metadata, just like SpecRef does."

Calling that HTTP API directly might be OK - as I doubt we want to store 100 million referenced :) But we probably want to check for limitations... or if we need a proxy because of API keys, or if there are any privacy/commercial concerns with this Crossref service (I don't know anything about it - might be all good but worth checking!). What might useful is of SpecRef converted from Crossref -> the SpecRef format (and maybe cached retrieved entries).   

[1] https://github.com/w3c/respec/issues/2568