From: testarne@athena.mit.edu (Thad E Starner) Subject: Online Citations and Online Publishing (long) Date: Sat, 17 Aug 1991 01:00:55 GMT Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology I have also come across the predicament of on-line citations. I had to do a quick paper on state-of-the-art VR and, of course, a good deal of information I knew from the net. However, I desperately scrambled to find the proper journal articles to back up the information. While finding the paper to back up the bits may seem to be the right thing to do at present, it is not always possible when talking about the cutting edge. Also, sometimes the sources will not be accessible or will not be in a language the author understands. Thus, the electronic posting is the only reference available. If a format doesn't exist, we should make one and see that the AMA and all the rest get it. How does this sound? Last, First_initial. (specific date); username. Subject_line. Newsjournal (underlined), archive_site. So, for example, this posting could be referenced as Starner, T. (1991, Aug. 16); testarne@athena.mit.edu. Re: Online citations and online publishing. sci.virtual-worlds, milton.u.washington.edu. ------------------ I tried to follow what I believe to be an AMA format (the -'s are supposed to be an underline). The net group/journal is specifically kept lowercase so as to distinguish it from paper. Several points of interest: Online citations should only be used when other references can't be found (within reason). Today's library systems are pretty powerful so as long as people aren't lax there shouldn't be too much of a problem. For instance, I found a small article in New Scientist (Josephson, H. New Scientist, Dec. 91, p.14) about the Battletech game ------------- after hearing about it on the net. Contributors should try to provide references whenever they are posting something that others might use. Also, care should be taken to be clear when presenting ideas, facts, or theories. This will help cut down on the potential embarrassment. I don't think this has to cut down on the normal traffic on groups such as sci.virtual-worlds. The only people that have to be careful are the people who are posting something like: "I've just created a new system which does this by . Smith (reference) did something similar, but this does it differently. This is how it works:" or "We've tried that-it didn't work for this reason (see reference):" Furthermore, online citations should only be made when there are public archives (or equivalent) where the reference can be checked. -------------------------- Online Publishing Personally, I would like to see groups whose sole purpose is to get out information faster than the relatively slow journals and conferences. For instance, sci.virtual-worlds.journal which would have an editor to weed out questionable articles or ask the author(s) to clarify a point. Not only would this speed up the communication process (which saves on duplicity in research, helps in collaboration, etc.) but could help in creating better printed journal articles (people responding, giving suggestions, asking for clarification, etc.). Such a method would also make a online citation more suitable by allowing the "publishing" organization to add its name to the citation (between the username(s) and the Subject line). Also, we would get all the standard advantages of online info...fast searching, no paper, better medium, etc. Note that having such an online publishing system would require us looking further into issues of academic credibility, "publish or perish", and copyrights. The editor would have to be reputable and trusted. The technology is here, the problem is convincing the academic society that publishing (or "pre-publishing") on the net is useful (fears being that someone will take your bits and beat you to print, that sponsors won't be impressed by electronic output, etc.). These are just some ideas I thought I'd share. We may be the best group of researchers to implement such a system by the very nature of what we study. Since VR researchers are interested in creating new worlds and communication, it makes sense that most of the researchers search out or have ties to the virtual world that already exists: the net. Some may argue that such a publishing system is unfair to those who don't have net access. However, I believe that the nature of this group makes such a system more fair for our field than other fields. Furthermore, such a system would help distribute the advantages of the major research centers to the less funded ones. Researchers without net access can still follow events in published versions of the articles that appear. Futhermore, net access is spreading so that the educational wealth will be better distributed in the future. Perhaps we can even have some sense of educational equality in the future. Sorry about the soapbox. Thad Starner thad@media-lab.media.mit.edu