Comments on: Towards Scholarly HTML

By: Jon Ippolito

Jon Ippolito — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:23:47 +0000

Peter, I enjoyed this article and couldn't agree more that HTML has much more than PDF to offer scholars of the Internet age, and that in the long run it will be the more survivable format. ICE sounds like an exciting development from this perspective. I wonder if you know about ThoughtMesh, an open-source HTML publishing tool that autogenerates keywords that connect related essays published across the Web? You can download a ThoughtMesh essay in PDF form, but if instead you choose the default format (an HTML document and associated files in a folder), then you can take advantage of its on-board recommendation features. I think these features are important to scholars because I believe most academic work suffers less from a lack of portability than from a lack of visibility outside the author's immediate circle or discipline. As you rightly point out, when combined with JavaScript and the like HTML offers a rich expressive toolkit to help fix that problem.

By: Academic Productivity » Review of Google Wave as a scholarly HTML editor

Academic Productivity » Review of Google Wave as a scholarly HTML editor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:29:15 +0000

[...] Peter Sefton wrote a series of posts on wave. He has published on Scholarly HTML so I read attentively what he has to say. What follows is some highlights of his posts, and my [...]

By: Chris Rusbridge

Chris Rusbridge — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:32:39 +0000

Peter, I did like this, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting when I read it through. I guess the emphasis is very much on the “Towards” bit.

I would like to see more work on what scholarly HTML actually is (and in particular what relationship it might have to NLM XML DTD). I would wonder whether XML isn’t the right emphasis, anyway. I’d want to know more about how to put in RDF bits, which make it work more.

But my biggest concern is a slightly daft one. I use 3 browsers, and each one uses a different (and as far as I can see incompatible) format to save a HTML “page” (the package of HTML and associated gizmos that make up what we see). The rela benefit of PDF is that it reliably packages all that stuff. The disadvantage is that it bangs its edges to fit in that rectangular box, as you point out. But if I can’t save and share HTML properly, how can we claim it as a scholarly communications medium.

Where am I going wrong?

By: Peter Suber

Peter Suber — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:39:29 +0000

Thanks, Peter. I just tagged your post for the OA tracking project. To be as fair as possible to _Serials Review_, I also tagged its version of the article (using the DOI), and tagged it first so that it appears first in the project feed. Good luck with your article and your HTML work. To me, displacing PDF with XML or HTML can’t come a day too soon.

By: ptsefton

ptsefton — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:11:31 +0000

@peter: Thanks for asking! I’d trust your judgment on what you link to. You’re the expert on OA after all. I would assume that in that context people often link to author-posted versions of articles, and if anyone wants to cite the thing in a formal publication they can choose to use the DOI as requested by the copyright owner. And as I said if you think the context I added to the article is of interest then by all means link to the page.

By: Peter Suber

Peter Suber — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:18:34 +0000

Hi Peter: Thanks for posting this. Would you mind if I tagged it for the Open access tracking project? Normally I wouldn't ask. But the tag would create a link from the project feed to the post, and you requested no incoming links.

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:44:34 +0000

Extremely minor nit: IRs often (typically?) aren’t “expected” to contain any particular format, not even PDF. I tell my depositors that I accept PDF but prefer other formats, and I know other IR managers who do likewise.

Other than that, good show! I think the inline commenting is a great carrot for ICE use.