Who Should Notify Authors Whenever They Are Cited?

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

Peter Suber wrote in Open Access News:

Notifying authors when they are cited

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/01/notifying-authors-when-they-are-cited.html>

Elsevier has launched CiteAlert 
<http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/cite_alert>, 
a free service notifying authors when one of their papers is 
cited by an Elsevier journal.  Thanks to ResourceShelf.

The service only covers citations to articles published since 
2005 in journals indexed by Scopus <http://www.scopus.com/>.

Comments

- This is useful as far as it goes, and I can see why Elsevier can't take
it much further on its own.  But imagine if all journal publishers offered
similar services.  The utility of receiving their reports, knowing that they
comprehensively covered the field, would be immense.  But the labor of
signing up for each one separately would also be immense, not to mention the
labor of re-creating the service at thousands of different publishers.  The
bother of reading separate reports from separate publishers would also be
immense.  I understand that Elsevier's portfolio is larger than anyone
else's, but the long tail of academic publishing means that Elsevier's
titles still constitute less than 10% of all of peer-reviewed journals.

- I'd like to see a service that notifies authors when one of their works
is cited by any journal, regardless of its publisher.  If this can't be done
by a creative developer harvesting online information (because the harvester
doesn't have access to TA sites), then how about a consortial solution
from the publishers themselves?  And don't stop at emails to authors.
Create RSS feeds which users can mash-up in any way they like.  Imagine
getting a feed of your citations from this hypothetical service and a feed
of your downloads from your institutional repository.  Imagine your IR
feeding the citations in your articles to an OA database, upon which anyone
could draw, including this hypothetical service.

- Who could do this?

*OpenURL <http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/>?
*CrossRef <http://www.crossref.org/>? 
*ParaCite<http://paracite.eprints.org/>?
*Google Scholar <http://scholar.google.com/>?
*OCLC <http://www.oclc.org/> (after it acquires OAIster
  <http://www.oaister.org/>)?
*A developer at an institution like Harvard with access to the 
bulk of TA journals?

Perhaps someone could build the OA database now, with the 
citation-input and email- and RSS-output functions, and worry 
later about how to recruit publishers and repositories and/or how 
to harvest their citations.

It is clear who should notify whom -- once the global research 
community's task is done. Our task is first to get all refereed 
research journal articles self-archived in their authors' 
Institutional Repositories (IRs) <http://roar.eprints.org/> 
immediately upon acceptance for publication.

To accomplish that we need universal Green OA deposit mandates to 
be adopted by all institutions and funders, worldwide.

Once all current and future articles are being immediately 
deposited in their authors' IRs, the rest is easy:

The articles are all in OAI-compliant IRs. The IR software treats 
the articles in the reference list of each of its own deposited 
articles as metadata to be linked to the cited article, where it 
too is deposited in the distributed network of IRs. A citation 
harvesting service operating over this interlinked network of IRs 
can then provide (among many, many other scientometric services) 
a notification service, emailing each author of a deposited 
article whenever a new deposit cites it. (No proporietary 
firewalls, no toll- or access-barriers: IR-to-IR, i.e., 
peer-to-peer.)

Stevan Harnad