Re: Who Should Notify Authors Whenever They Are Cited?

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

If you go to google.com/alerts and type in the title of your 
article and an email address, you'll get an alert every time the 
article is mentioned in a web page that's indexed by Google, e.g. 
as a reference in a paper. Just repeat for every article you've 
written. Not entirely fail safe, but pretty good.

Jan Velterop


On 1 Feb 2009, at 18:52, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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