Colleagues at work pointed to this long read on Medium: Open Access Knowledge: Digital Style Guide. In it, Patrick Dunleavy makes the case that, whenever possible, academic citations should point to "free" online versions of resources rather than the archaic "dead tree" version seemingly favoured by traditional style guides. He also argues that in addition to "real" open access repositories, if the material is available on ResearchGate, Academia.edu or Mendeley, go ahead and throw in a link. The idea is that whatever gets the material into the hands of the reader is what should be included in the citation (or alternate citation, which he suggests adding). Fair enough, but why not go ahead and include some sort of link to SciHub too? :-)
One of the other arguments he makes is to drop the practice of abbreviating author names and journal titles in the citation, and I wholeheartedly agree. Why, then, does he suggest abbreviations to describe the type of access? ([OAg] [PW] [LEV] [Non$] etc.) Spell those suckers out too! If you're going to stick with them though, why not substitute the $ for PW - I think it's clearer.
The second interesting citation-related post comes from Jon Udell, who suggests How to improve Wikipedia citations with Hypothesis direct links. Hypothes.is is sort of like a URL-shortening service, but with the ability to annotate text as well. Hey wait a minute, Hypothes.is could be used to perfectly solve the issues mentioned in points 9 and 10 of Dunleavy's post! Seriously, click this link!
I love it when stuff like this mashes up. I'm now off to make sure Patrick and Jon know about each other!
