Who Should Notify Authors Whenever They Are Cited?

Peter Suber wrote in Open Access News:

Notifying authors when they are cited

Elsevier has launched CiteAlert, 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.

Comments [by Peter Suber]

"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? CrossRef? ParaCite? Google Scholar? OCLC (after it acquires OAIster)? 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 (Green OA ) task is done. Our task is first to get all refereed research journal articles self-archived in their authors' Institutional Repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for publication. (To accomplish that we need universal Green OA self-archiving 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
American Scientist Open Access Forum