[Open-access] How to cite the Panton Principles?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Let me be absolutely clear:
>
> (i) The Panton principles have exactly the same value for scholarship
> which isn't Science = STM.
>

I admit that I am an STM-centric thinker. I try to avoid it but often fail.

However, rightly or wrongly, the PP are now a historical document. We
deliberately limited ourselves to science because:
* there was a pressing problem. (There still is but the problem is better
defined now)
* factual data are critical to many sciences. That's not to say that other
disciplines don't also have facts but the sciences tend to have larger
amounts
* we were able to make a useful distinction between text, data and
metadata. Later Adrian Pohl reused the PP to develop the Principles for
Open Bibliography. In that we had to work harder to define what the "data"
were

>
>
> (ii) Citations guidelines valid only for Science are not acceptable.
>
> There are enough disciplines with full first name standard. You cannot
> identfiy something with personal IDs like PND etc. with first name
> initals. I think it is bibliographically - open bibliography! -
> important enough to know WHO wrote an article. "Pollock R" is saying
> absolutely nothing - one has to do additional research to find out who
> is R[ ] Pollock.
>

I'm sympathetic to this. An electronic article has a fairly definitive
canonicalisation (though not defined) and is intended to be locatable. It
is possible to reconstruct most (but not all) authors. But the PP do not
have a definitive location and are also LIBRE so they can be copied.

>
> (iii) As is there is anglo-centric thinking that only contributions in
> the English language have ontological value there is also STM-centric
> thinking.
>
>
If you think there are disciplines beyond STM to which the principles could
apply and be operated then it sounds an excellent idea. But you will
probably have to work hard to define what is data and what is open.




-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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