Re: Publisher's requirements for links from published articles

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:29:28 +0100

I respond to two postings below; the first from Jean Kempf, the second
from Jean-Claude Guedon. (I remind readers that the query that started
this thread was about where to place the link in the IR metadata for a
self-archived author postprint so as to satisfy the request of Green
publishers to do so. The topic has since been directed to the question
of how to indicated the location of quoted passages when one is citing
a self-archived author postprint...) -- SH

(1) On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Jean KEMPF wrote:

> to convince scholars to come to OA, we must pay great attention to the
> differences between the... disciplines... If they are not respected...
> no chance of winning some departments over to OA. And page number citation
> is not simply a "residual Gutenberg compulsion"...

There are no discipline differences whatsoever in the pertinent respect
here:

If *quoting* a passage (not just *citing* the whole work), go ahead
and use pages if you have access to the print version. No contest.
(Users of the unpaginated OA version will be able to find the quotes
easily with a string-search.)

If you don't have access to the print version, use section heading and
paragraph number. (It's actually a good idea in both cases.)

> Many documents... exist in two physical forms [print and online]
> In this case the UR version (the quoted one) must remain the printed
> one and thus one (still) needs to refer to the folio (page number).

Fine. Use the page numbers (or both) whenever you have access. If not,
use just section heading and paragraph number.

Note: No discipline has a scholarly tradition concerning how to quote a
passage when one does not have access to the version with the page
numbers. If the choice is between not quoting at all, for lack of the
page numbers, or quoting using section heading and paragraph number, I
think the choice is obvious, in any discipline.

(And I think it would be an utter waste of time for a self-archiving
author to take the trouble to generate a PDF whose pagination matched
the journal's print version! We are still in an era where, despite
the dramatic author benefits, it requires institutional and funder
mandates in order to induce authors to do the few keystrokes that it takes
to make their refereed final drafts OA, in their exact current form,
so that all would-be users who cannot access the toll-access version
can nevertheless access and use the OA version. It would be absurd to
ask those already-sluggish authors to do *more* -- to generate a PDF that
matches the pagination of the journal version -- just so as to provide
the page-data for possible quotes. Let's worry about OA provision first,
and page-information for quotes after, if need be. [I am dead certain
the page fetish for quotes will die a natural death before that.])

(2) On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote:

> The work is a content, not an instantiation of same in a particular form.
> What is protected by copyright is a form of expression that has taken
> material form, not a particular material instantiation of the mode of
> expression.

But we are not talking about copyright. We are talking about whether or
not page numbers are needed in order to quote passages from a
self-archived OA version that lacks the page numbers of the publisher's
toll-access PDF.

> Likewise, peer review deals with a content, a form of expression, not a
> particular material form of instantiation. As a result, peer review is
> not tied to a particular material form... [T]he publisher gives it a
> particular material form, be it print or bits.

All true, but not at all relevant to what we are discussing:

We are discussing how to cite and quote the author's final peer-reviewed
draft of a published journal article. If anything was missing, it was
the publisher's pagination, not the peer review.

And the peers reviewed for free, but it was the (publisher's) editor
who picked the peers, specified which of their recommendations must be
followed in the author's revision, determined whether the revision had
been successful, and certified the outcome with the journal name.

All of that is there, in the author's OA postprint. The only thing
missing is the page numbers of the publisher's PDF.

There is no citation problem. And there is certainly no need for the
author's institution to somehow claim that the peer-reviewed draft has
been "published" by the institution: It was published by the journal. The
journal implemented the peer review and certified its outcome with its
name (not the institution). And it is the journal that is cited when
citing the work. The OA version in the IR is merely a way to provide
access to the cited work.

> Citation, on the other hand, is tied to a particular material because
> citation is aimed at helping retrieval.

The cited work is the published work. We are simply talking about where
in the cited work the *quoted* (or noted) passages occur. In the absence
of the pagination, specifying the section heading and paragraph number
is just fine.

> If we cite down to the page level in many disciplines, it is to help
> check that the citation is indeed correct, that the text cited is not
> cited out of context, etc. It is fundamental for the work of scientists
> and scholars.

That's fine. The section heading and paragraph number accomplishes
exactly the same ends.

> Because of its retrieval function, citation has provided an important
> handle for publishers to make their material version of a text the
> "canonical" version. However, if the IR material version of the same is
> declared citable by declaring that it is a certified copy of the peer
> reviewed "work", then it can be cited directly. The certification comes
> from the good name of the hosting institution - presumably a university
> or reputable research centre.

The author's refereed final draft can be both cited and quoted directly
whether or not it has been "certified" (or "validated":
http://valrec.eprints.org/ ) as being verbatim identical with the
published version. (Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it
has indeed been checked and so certified.)

The issue was: having been "certified" as verbatim-identical with the
publisher's version *except for the pagination* what do we cite and
quote, and how?

Answer: We continue to cite the published version, as always. And we
pinpoint quoted passages by section heading and paragraph number. We
could, as Jean-Claude suggests, instead pinpoint quoted passages based
on the divergent pagination of the self-archived version in the IR, but
it seems to me that that would not be a very useful practice (e.g., for
readers of the citing article who have access to the journal version: it
confuses them, needlessly).

But nothing much hangs on this, one way or the other. It seems to me a
very minor, even trivial, contingency.

> In line with this analysis, many of us have begun providing the on-line
> address of the documents we cite when they are in open access so as to
> facilitate the retrieval needs of our colleagues. One small, extra step,
> is needed to complete the process: just declare the IR version to be an
> acceptable source for a citation.

Of course all citations (of the published journal article!) should be
accompanied by the URL of the OA version (so those who can't afford
access to the publisher's version can still access the article).
Everyone who provides or uses OA content should do that.

But the only two questions here were:

(1) Where to put the link to the publisher version (especially when the
publisher is Green on self-archiving and has asked for the link)?
(Answer" In the IR's "other locations" field.)

(2) How to quote specific passages from the OA version? (Answer:
section heading and paragraph number. Inefficient option: pagination of
the self-archived version.)

No one using OA articles has felt the need for the IR to "declare the IR
version to be an acceptable version." (The problem so far has been to
get the author to provide an IR version at all!) But this "declaration"
is possible (e.g., via http://valrec.eprints.org/ ). It does not,
however, answer the question of which way to pinpoint quotes (nor where
to link to the publisher's version).

> Does this clarify matters?

I'm afraid it continues to do the exact opposite!

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

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Received on Fri Apr 25 2008 - 20:33:36 BST

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