CSL Agenda 2016

Hi everyone,

Bruce, Frank, Rintze, and I met this Monday to discuss the current state of
CSL. This is the first of two e-mails summarizing our discussion, which is
meant as a basis for a broader discussion here on the list. In this e-mail
I’ll talk about CSL infrastructure, the second one will be about CSL
specifications/updates.

  1. Moving style hosting to www.citationstyles.org
    We’d like to transition from zotero.org style ids, and offer both a GUI
    version of the style repository on citationstyles.org and serve styles from
    there (e.g. for auto-updating). We think this should be the top priority
    for 2016
    We’ll want a proper hosting solution for this and, if clients will want to
    rely on our site (rather than pulling from github the way Zotero & Mendeley
    currently do) for style updates. We also will want to hire someone to do
    this for us. (Elsevier/Mendeley has already announced they’ll again support
    us, so we have a budget). Sylvester suggested someone to us, but if anyone
    here is interested or has recommendations, that’d be very welcome, too.
    Also, for any of the downstream users of the style–will a global change in
    style ids cause major headaches? Is there anything we can/should do to make
    the transition go smoothly?

  2. Moving away from sourceforge
    Rintze has mentioned this before, but we’d like to look at moving away from
    sourceforge, which is increasingly spammy, sometimes unreliable, and of an
    uncertain future. We’re thinking most likely www.discourse.org, with a paid
    hosting solution, but are open to alternatives. Also, we want to make sure
    that there’s a way to get data out of Discourse before switching.

We won’t be able to transfer the list archive to discourse easily, but
it’ll keep existing on nabble.com

  1. Achievements & Miscellanea:
  • Sylvester built us a nice bot that’s currently screening pull requests
    and displaying greeting messages as well as pass/fail follow-ups for pull
    requests. It’s working nicely.
  • As some of you may have seen, we have, with the agreement of the folks
    from Mendeley and Columbia Lib, moved the CSL visual editor into the
    citation-style-language github and have successfully updated styles and
    locales. At least for now, it seems easy enough to maintain that I’ll be
    able to handle that, thanks to Steve Ridout’s great documentation and
    coding of that project.
  • We’ll also slightly reorganize repositories which contain lists of
    journals and styles by publishers for dependent styles and try to get these
    updated as soon as possible. Anyone who wants in on that (checking with
    publishers, tracking down new lists etc.) help would be very welcome.

OK. That’s it for infrastructure I believe. Please do chime in with
concerns, disagreement, praise, or other ideas/priorities.

Specification e-mail to follow later this weekend.
Best,
Sebastian–
Sebastian Karcher, PhD
www.sebastiankarcher.com

Please, do not forget to update gmane.text.xml.xbiblio.devel as
well.

Best,

Matěj

Matěj, what do you mean exactly with “update
gmane.text.xml.xbiblio.devel”? Update how?

Also, is there any particular reason you’re attached to the Gmane
archive? Its archive of the mailing list only goes back to 2011,
whereas the Nabble mirror goes back all the way back to 2004 (which
was done by manually uploading the mbox archive from SourceForge:
http://support.nabble.com/Import-request-td5922233.html). I’m also the
current administrator of the Nabble mirror, while I don’t know who
controls the Gmane one.

Rintze