Hi everyone,
I’m in touch with a rep from Taylor and Francis about getting a
Journal/style list similar to what we got from Springer so that we can add
their journals to repo (T&F started consolidating their styles about a year
ago).
I also suggested to them linking to CSL styles in their instructions to
authors and she seemed open to that, but asked what to link to. Since every
major CSL project runs its own version of how to install styles that seemed
tricky. How should we go about that? What should I ask them to put in their
author guides?
Sebastian–
Sebastian Karcher
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Political Science
Northwestern University
Great questions!
Two things, which I’ve said before:
-
I still think it’d be great for authors to be able to do a
one-click install from an author instruction page at a journal site.
-
that at some point, journals should just self-host the styles
Can we really not make both of these possible?
On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Sebastian Karcher
I also suggested to them linking to CSL styles in their instructions to
authors and she seemed open to that, but asked what to link to. Since every
major CSL project runs its own version of how to install styles that seemed
tricky. How should we go about that? What should I ask them to put in their
author guides?
Point to Zotero Style Repository ? See also “What is the best way to
point authors to a certain CSL style?” at
http://citationstyles.org/faq/ for more thoughts.
Rintze
I’m not sure about 2 - I see a lot of potential downsides to that, too, but
I thought
- was in general already possible - Zotero (and I believe Mendeley) will
install CSLs server with the right mime-type - I believe text/x-csl for
Zotero.
Charles - what about Papers?
For Papers, our approach is that the user should not have to download or install anything. The CSL repo is simply included in the app. We need to improve the way styles are updated, as it’s currently only done on new releases.
Users can just drag a CSL file into the app otherwise.
One issue with downloading of styles from a web site is that in the case of Safari, it changes the extension to .txt.
Charles
We’ve supported application/vnd.citationstyles.style+xml for a while, so
it’d be better to use that than text/x-csl.
FWIW, in theory the Zotero repo (which Zotero clients check in with
daily) is set up to fetch, cache, and serve updated styles from other
servers as long as the style has a valid rel=“link”. This is currently
disabled, since I haven’t tested it, but we should be able to support
this easily.
Interesting development, Sebastian!
Hi,
In Mendeley: the publisher could host the style in any place and then
have a link like:
mendeley://csl://http://publisher.com/style/style1.csl
The browser will invoke Mendeley to handle this link, which one will
download the style, install and select it.
We always push the publishers to add the styles to citationstyles.org
github repository (with more or less success).
Regards,
Hello,
I think I might be re-stating Frank’s suggestion here.
For mendeley:// links, we have an intermediate URL at
open.mendeley.com (eg.
http://open.mendeley.com/library/filter/mendeley-suggest) which
forwards to mendeley:// or gives the user further steps if they do not
have Mendeley installed.
We could provide a similar page on citationstyles.org which would
handle the details of getting the style into the user’s app. A simple
implementation would present a list of apps and clicking one would
forward to that app (eg. via a mendeley:// link, or a direct CSL link
for Zotero) or provide suitable instructions.
Regards,
Rob.
Question: what’s involved in “getting the style into the user’s app”?
For sake of argument, why can’t we have a simple general solution like:
CSL styles go into a common directory; on linux, say ~/.cslstyles or some such.
Apps then simply watch that directory.
I’m not a developer, so probably missing some detail, but I think
simple is better all around.
For sake of argument, why can’t we have a simple general solution like:
CSL styles go into a common directory; on linux, say ~/.cslstyles or some such.
That is not simple for the majority of users.
The most generic thing I can suggest is that you provide a link to a
.csl file and serve it with the right mime type.
Zotero (in Firefox at least) intercepts the download based on the mime
types, native apps can register as handlers for the .csl extension
and can provide drag-and-drop support. Mendeley is not currently
registered as a handler for .csl files I believe but it should be a
simple change to make.
Regards,
Rob.