25 April 2002
To: Marcia McNutt, AGU President
From: Ralph Keeling, Jeff Severinghaus, Peter Brueggeman
CC: AGU Executive Committee, AGU Publications Committee
Dear Marcia,
It has recently come to our attention that, in its move towards online
publishing, AGU has done away with sequential page numbering of journal articles
as of January 2002. Instead, AGU is requiring articles to be cited based on a
20-digit character string (e.g. 10.1029/2001JA001490), known as a digital object
identifier (DOI), and disallowing current scientific practice wherein articles
are cited by volume, issue, and page numbers.
The cited benefits of AGU's new system include the ability to improve online
access, the flexibility to submit videos or other multi-media materials as part
of an article, and the ability to provide electronic links to other articles or
pieces. The impression given by the AGU web page
(http://www.agu.org/pubs/e_publishing/) is that the elimination of sequential
page numbering of journal articles was necessary to provide these benefits.
In a search of current publishing practice, however, we have come up with a
short, admittedly incomplete, list of commercial publishers and professional
societies who continue to use sequential page numbering of journal articles in
their transition to online publishing: American Meteorological Society,
American Chemical Society, American Fisheries Society, Nature, Science, American
Institute of Physics, Elsevier, Company of Biologists, Royal Society of
Chemistry, University of Chicago Press, Geological Society of America, Kluwer,
Springer Verlag, Cambridge University Press. Many of these consider their
ejournal to be the archival record, and provide active links via an HTML
version. We were unable to find a single example, besides AGU, of a scientific
publisher abandoning sequential page numbering of journal articles in the
transition to online publishing. We also checked with the Director of the
Science & Engineering Library at UCSD, who was also unable to cite any publisher
following AGU practice. Although examples might still be found, it is clear
that AGU's practice is out of step with general trends in online publishing.
As an emerging industry standard, the DOI clearly fulfills an essential need in
electronic publishing, by providing an alternative to the awkward practice of
referring to (unstable) web addresses. Nevertheless, the way the DOI is being
implemented by AGU, as the unique identifier of scientific articles for citation
purposes, is apparently highly eccentric.
Unfortunately, AGU's decision to eliminate sequential page numbering of journal
articles and to force citations to be based solely on the DOI comes at a high
cost:
(1) The use of the DOI for citations creates problems in compatibility. It is
annoying and troublesome to have two different filing or organizational systems
in use concurrently in science: AGU and everybody else. It appears that all
science ejournal publishers except AGU refer to their publishable units, the
article, by volume, issue, and pagination. Although the community that commonly
cites AGU journals may be able to adapt, problems will remain for the wider
community that doesn't understand the AGU system and doesn't want to be
bothered. Some may assume that AGU publications are "grey" literature or still
"in press", since their citations look non-standard among scientific
publications. It's naive to assume that AGU's unique system will ever be
transparent to the scientific community at large. Many institutions' libraries
will continue to subscribe to AGU journals in print for reasons of economy; the
DOI is awkward for anyone accessing print collections in libraries.
(2) The DOI carries no information about article length, which is valuable for
many obvious reasons.
(3) Citation based on the DOI takes up extra print space. Less than 20
characters are typically required for indicating volume number and page range
(e.g. "24, 1654-1675" entails 13 characters). The extra length of the DOI may
cause the citation to spill over onto a new line, thus taking up even more
space. The difference is probably not trivial for high-profile journals like
Science and Nature, where space is at a premium.
(4) The DOI strings are likely prone to transcription error because, with so
many characters in an unbroken string, they are hard to scan by eye. We don't
live in a perfect copy-and-paste world, and a significant percentage of people
will be typing in these DOIs.
In summary, the decision to eliminate sequential page numbering of journal
articles in favor of the DOI has created many problems for AGU readers and
authors. One might be tempted to argue that these are problems of transition
which will be reduced once people adapt to the new system. In fact, every one
of the problems listed above will present a continuing difficulty, which will
only be lessened if the entire scientific journal publishing enterprise changes
the way it cites articles to AGU's unique approach.
We therefore request that the decision at AGU to eliminate sequential page
numbering and to require use of the DOI for citation purposes be revisited. The
collective practices of scientific publishers show that sequential page
numbering for journal/articles is possible in an online world. If, for some
reason, AGU finds sequential page numbering to be difficult, a user-friendly
scheme co-existing with the DOI could be developed in which various
methods/terms are used to identify and number journal articles within
volumes/issues without the usage of sequential pagination, like fascicules,
parts, etc. In all likelihood, an acceptable scheme exists which entails only
minor changes to the present AGU production process.
Sincerely,
Ralph Keeling
Assoc. Prof., Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Jeff Severinghaus
Assoc. Prof., Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Peter Brueggeman
Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
=============================================================
Peter Brueggeman, Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr, Dept 0219, San Diego CA 92093-0219 USA
pbrueggeman@ucsd.edu Tel 858/534-1230 Fax 858/534-5269
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