Cite by section?

Elsevier, which publishes a lot of science journals but not many philosophy journals, has apparently sent the University of Calgary a "take-down notice" regarding articles on web pages owned by the university. This goes beyond Elsevier's recent efforts to have copyrighted content removed from repositories like Academia.edu.

In case you haven't followed these developments, here's how it works: While Elsevier and other publishers often allow authors to post final drafts of their papers on the Web, they prohibit the posting of final, published versions—i.e., of the version that you would get if you downloaded it from the journal's web site. People routinely violate these prohibitions. Elsevier's lawyers then send "take-down" notices to the owners of the relevant web sites, demanding that the owners remove the copyrighted material. (I've linked some articles below with more details; by linking to them, I don't mean to endorse everything they say.)

From Elsevier's perspective, having final drafts available for free and published versions behind a paywall is an excellent arrangement. Posting the drafts gives everyone access to the content and therefore increases the number of people who might want to cite an article. But it order to cite a particular page, you need access the the published version, since only the published version contains the relevant page numbers.

Elsevier's policy, however, leaves lots of academics frustrated because it limits the reach and impact of their own work and makes it harder for them to access and cite work other people's work. How should academics respond to this sort of problem?

Many academics have called for a shift to independent, open-access journals, but this is not an easy thing to accomplish. In the comments on the blog post above, paleontologist Mike Taylor offers a potentially easier solution: Adopt a convention of numbering the sections (and subsections) of papers and then cite other papers by section (e.g., Freschi 2014, §3.2) rather than by page number. Taylor claims that this is the convention in mathematics. Since section numbers don't change from the final draft to the published version, lack of access to the published version wouldn't matter.

Suppose philosophers started citing each other by section number. How might publishers respond? Well, they could impose "house styles" that prohibit numbering your sections and insist that citations be by page number. Science & Engineering Ethics, published by Springer, seems to prohibit numbered sections in their house style: When I had a piece accepted there, the copy editors removed the numbers from my sections and replaced references to section numbers (e.g., "in Section 2, I will...") with references to section titles. Imposing these requirements would deter people from relying on publicly accessible drafts of papers published in those journals: If you cited a part of the paper by section number, it would make it hard for people looking at the published version to know which section you meant. You could still cite such a paper by section number and hope people would track down the publicly available final draft, but it would be inconvenient.

However, I think this would somewhat shift the market power in the academics' favor. Suppose that some publishers—call them "Friendly Publishers"—made it feasible to cite papers by section number, whereas other "Unfriendly Publishers" made it difficult or inconvenient to do so. If philosophers had a preference for citing papers by section number, then each of us would have an incentive to publish with Friendly Publishers. That incentive wouldn't be strong enough to prevent, e.g., early-career philosophers from publishing with Unfriendly Publishers, but it would tilt the playing field toward Friendly Publishers.

What do you think? Should we be numbering our sections and citing each other by section number?

 

Related articles

Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from journal publisher Elsevier

Elsevier clamps down on academics posting their own papers online

Don't blame Elsevier for exercising the rights you gave them

Comments

[Martin Shuster]

David -- I think this is a great idea…but it is at best a stopgap. For the long-term health of the profession, philosophers need to move themselves away from a reliance on for-profit journal publishers (easier said than done, I know).

[Elisa Freschi]

Very interesting post, thanks!

May I nonetheless react in a provocative way? I volunteer for an open access journal, am part of open access projects and upload my last drafts (when I am the only author involved) on Academia, BUT I do not understand why should one blame publishing houses for issuing "take-down" notes. If one wants to have one's work circulate, there are plenty of OA journals. If one cares more for having one's work published on top journals, fine, but then why violating the publisher's rights by uploading the published version? It seems to me that one wants to have the cake and eat it.

Re. citing by sections: great idea. I am personally very much in favour of numbered sections (I insist in keeping numbers because I always have sub- and sub-sub-sections whose relation with the main topic would be lost if they only had a title) and in general I think that your idea would also enhance clarity in many philosophical articles!

[David Morrow]

Martin: I agree. It's a stopgap measure.

Elisa: I also think that many people overreact to the take-down notices. But I don't want to get sidetracked by that issue here.

When you insist on leaving in the section numbering, do the publishers put up a fight?

[Marcus Arvan]

This is a great post, David -- one that hits close to home. I actually don't have journal access at my institution, and it makes research really difficult. I often end up reading authors' drafts, and sometimes I have just cited paper sections as a result (as you suggest). Believe it or not, I haven't yet had a reviewer or journal call me out on it. It seems to work well, provided the section of the book or article actually is about the point cited.

[Kenny Pearce]

I got in the habit of citing things by section when I don't feel the need for a more precise citation because of working in early modern. Many of those works have short section numbers which are the same in every edition, while the page numbers differ, so it's easier to just cite by section when possible, and I do the same thing when citing the secondary literature. On the other hand, sections are often long enough that it's nice to have a citation to a specific page.

Another option is just to insert the journal page numbers in the margins or in brackets when you self-archive. This is easily done in LaTeX by using the command \marginpar{}. The result looks like this: http://philpapers.org/archive/PEATRO-7.1.pdf

[Elisa Freschi]

David: publishers accept my numbering when there are subsections. They don't if it is pleonastic (i.e., if I only have section 1, followed by sections 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.).

Kenny: Great idea, thanks. I use \marginnote{} for the same purpose, but I never thought of adding it in the drafts I upload on Academia.

A connected question: I hate converting files from .tex to .doc. Which journals accept .tex?

[Kenny Pearce]

Phil Review will at least accept PDFs (including those generated by LaTeX) for initial review purposes, although they require a .doc if accepted. (It's really nasty that a lot of journals have formatting requirements for initial submission, given that their accept rates are so low!) I don't actually know of any philosophy journals that accept .tex for final publication, but then I don't work on formal stuff. I'm sure some of the logic journals must.

[Shen-yi Liao]

Kenny Pearce: I'm glad I'm not the only one doing that! I'm not sure how legit it is, legally speaking, but no one has issued me a take down notice yet.

[Jonathan D. Jacobs]

(I posted a comment earlier but I'm not seeing it for some reason; I apologize if any of this is duplicate.)

It seems consistent with this policy that authors insert in their self-created papers that they publish on their websites a note about page numbers. So in the middle of the text the author could insert "[end page 79]". That would seem to solve it, except for perhaps footnotes that break across pages, but again, you could add a similar note in the footnote.

As for LaTeX, I know that PhilImprint takes LaTeX, and the journal I edit (Res Philosophica) does as well. If I remember correctly, PhilStudies took my .tex file, as well.

[Justin Caouette]

I look forward to the day when our open access journals become as good as some of the more established print journals. This would help to keep younger academics from being torn on where to send their work.

Thanks for the post, David. Very good suggestions, most of which I had not considered before.