----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Keeling" <rkeeling@ucsd.edu>
To: "George M. Hornberger" <gmh3k@cms.mail.virginia.edu>
Cc: "Marcia Mcnutt" <mcnutt@mbari.org>; "John A. Orcutt"
<jorcutt@igpp.ucsd.edu>; "John A. Knauss" <jknauss@gsosun1.gso.uri.edu>; "Robert
E. Dickenson" <robted@eas.gatech.edu>; "Gordon Rostoker"
<rostoker@space.ualberta.ca>; "A. F. Spilhaus Jr." <fspilhaus@agu.org>; <"Pubs
Com Dist pubscom_d"@agu.org>; <jseveringhaus@ucsd.edu>; "Peter Brueggeman"
<pbrueggeman@ucsd.edu>; <mgeller@notes.cc.sunysb.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: Sequential pagination in AGU Journals
To: George Hornberger, Chair AGU Publications Committee
From: Ralph Keeling, Jeff Severinghaus, Peter Brueggeman
CC: AGU Executive Committee, AGU Publications Committee
Dear George Hornberger,
Thank you for responding to our letter regarding AGU's use of the DOI. Your
letter helps to clarify certain issues, though you did not address our concern
about loss of information on article length. We remain unconvinced that AGU's
decision to eliminate a simple citation scheme and rely solely on the DOI to
cite AGU ejournal articles was well founded.
The American Physical Society is cited in your response to our letter. APS
citations on the websites of their various online journals of record have
article numbers and total page length for each article (excepting Reviews of
Modern Physics, which uses sequential pagination). Two other online journals of
record, Journal of Insect Science and Pediatrics, use article numbering; see
examples below. One online journal of record, LMS Journal of Computation and
Mathematics, continues to use sequential pagination. You also cited Nature as an
example. When you search across articles in Nature's "search" system, you
retrieve citations to Nature articles that incorporate the DOI in the citation
as an ADDITIONAL redundant citation element, and NOT REPLACING shorter, more
user-friendly citation elements. See examples below.
At the close of our letter to AGU, we suggested article numbering if it was
impossible to continue sequential pagination across articles, but we did not
propose it as an interim solution as you erroneously stated. We suggested it as
a user-friendly and simpler citation scheme to co-exist with the DOI, as APS and
other publishers are doing.
For centuries, scientists have been citing publications incorrectly, using
various arrangements of simple bibliographic elements such as volume number,
issue number, page, etc. It seems so simple, yet how many times have scientists
dealt with erroneous citations?. Human nature will not change now that journals
are electronic, and scientists will continue to make mistakes. Publishing
ejournal articles that are only citable by a long string of characters like the
DOI will increase the opportunity for error and make published articles more
difficult to locate, whether in print or electronic. Our concern would be
largely satisfied if AGU more closely followed the lead of APS and the other
online publishers in not requiring the use of the DOI for citations and in
providing information on page counts.
If the various responses to our earlier letter (which was circulated on various
list servers) are any guide, a course correction may be warranted. The next
step should involve input from a wider community than just AGU staff and the
publications committee.
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
EXAMPLES
Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics)--April 2002
Volume 65, Issue 4, Articles (04xxxx)
Entanglement induced by a single-mode heat environment
M. S. Kim, Jinhyoung Lee, D. Ahn, and P. L. Knight
Published 2 April 2002 (4 pages)
040101(R)
Dunkov, B.C., Georgieva, T., Yoshiga, T., Hall, M., Law, J.H. 2002.
Aedes aegypti ferritin heavy chain homologue: feeding of iron or
blood influences message levels, lengths and subunit abundance. 10
pp. Journal of Insect Science, 2.7.
Ron Keren and Eugenia Chan
A Meta-analysis of Randomized, Controlled Trials Comparing Short- and
Long-Course Antibiotic Therapy for Urinary Tract Infections in Children
Pediatrics 2002; 109: e70.
Evolutionary biology: Searching for speciation genes
Roger Butlin, Michael G. Ritchie
Nature 412, 31 - 33 (05 Jul 2001) DOI: 10.1038/35083669
EARLIER CORRESPONDENCE:
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8 May 2002
Ralph Keeling
Jeff Severinghaus
Peter Brueggeman
Scripps Institute Of Oceanography
Dear Drs. Keeling, Severinghaus, and Brueggeman
Thank you for copying me on your recent note to Marcia McNutt inquiring about
the decision of AGU to forego sequential page numbers in our journals. Although
the Publications Committee did not meet subsequent to receipt of your e-mail, I
have been in contact with the members and with staff at headquarters regarding
the points you make and the questions you raise. After carefully thinking about
the issues once more, we remain convinced that the course charted by AGU is
correct.
As noted in the excellent article by Sam Bowring that you cite (i.e.,
http://www.agu.org/pubs/e_publishing/), AGU has declared the electronic version
to be the journal of record. The html is the online representation of the
journal of record. AGU did this so that nonprintable material would be an
integral part of the record of science and not simply supplementary to it. Even
though other publishers are including nonprintable material on their web sites,
it is not a part of the formal record so long as their print version is the
journal of record.
The view expressed in your note is that AGU's use of the Digital Object
Identifier (DOI) is "highly eccentric" and "out of step with general trends in
on-line publishing". Our alternative view is that AGU has taken a bold step
ahead of almost everyone else. The society publications to which you refer in
your note have not declared their electronic journals to be the journals of
record. Archiving the electronic files is a far different thing than declaring a
change in the journal of record. We have been told by one society on your list
that when they do take the step of declaring the electronic version to be the
record, they expect to move to the DOI as the means of citation. Although not on
your list, the American Physical Society has declared their electronic version
to be the journal of record. APS does not have sequential page numbers. They use
a 6-digit article number and instruct authors to cite that number in lieu of
page numbers.
We believe that in the near future more journals will move to use of the DOI and
that it will become clear that AGU's practice is not "out of step with general
trends in online publishing", but rather defines the trend for the industry. For
example, already Nature has adopted the DOI as part of their citation. The
following is a quote from their web site: "Given the utility of the DOI in
locating an online publication in the future, we encourage you to use DOIs in
your reference citations (see "Can I use the DOI in a reference citation?")."
Furthermore, we believe that the method of citation chosen by AGU is rather
clear and that users of the print version will not have difficulty in locating
an article. The AGU recommended citation style includes the volume and the issue
number. The issue number is an aid for those using the print journal. Once the
user gets to the printed journal, he/she finds an author index and a DOI index
for that issue. These indexes indicate the article order within that printed
issue. We assign an issue number at the time of publication. For special
sections, that number may be several months in the future. But the issue number
is the best key to finding an article on the shelf of printed journals. The
issue number appears on the spine of the journal.
Of course, as you state, we could search for interim "solutions" that would
allow sequential page numbers to coexist with the DOI. We have considered this
issue and find that the costs of doing this far outweigh any benefits. Here are
two ideas and our reasons for discarding them.
1. We could have sequential page numbers in the printed journal if we did not
provide a pdf online until the journal is printed. (Otherwise, we have to pay
the cost for remaking all of the pages just to get the page numbers into them
for the printing process, an additional cost that is clearly not justified).
This strikes us as a terrible idea.
2. We could go the route of Nature and cite the paper one way before printing
and another way after. The Publications Committee sees this as an option that
potentially causes confusion rather than enlightenment. We chose the DOI as a
consistent and persistent way of citing an article from the moment of
publication. The DOI is an international standard designed exactly for the
purpose of citing electronic material in a way that persists regardless of
changes in technology or changes in the server on which a particular file
resides.
In summary, it is our opinion that we cannot simply stagger along attempting to
keep up with changes by applying short-term, inadequate fixes. We believe that
the move to the DOI as a citation standard may put AGU ahead of the curve, but
the rest of the world will soon catch up and we all will become used to the new
way of citing articles. We hope that you will stay the course with AGU, even if
you remain skeptical. At the pace of advancements in electronic publishing, the
results of the "experiment" will be known to all of us in very short order.
Sincerely,
George M. Hornberger, Chair
Publications Committee, AGU
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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
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