Peaya Cite (Peaya, make your academic life easier) has some nice features for citing within Word that Zotero doesn’t currently provide.
One of the features (contextual hinting; which I’d like to see) is
clearly reminiscent of (though more limited than) this post of mine:
http://community.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/archives/2004/05/26/dashboard-and-remembrance-agent
To generate its citations ships with a folder full of CSL styles that were presumably obtained from the Zotero repository. This fact alone doesn’t concern me; styles want to be free.
I am more concerned with what seems to have happened to the “author” and “contributor” elements in each of these styles, and, to a lesser extent, the proliferation of a bunch of style IDs that refer to the same style. The styles I have looked at are verbatim or nearly verbatim copies of the Zotero styles with changed IDs and links. In every case, the author is listed as
Valerie Song
valerie@peaya.com
Sean has attempted to email Ms. Song, but unfortunately her email address does not appear to be valid.
For some styles, this is merely unethical and ambiguously illegal. However, Richard’s styles still include the CC tag
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License: CC BY-SA 3.0 US Deed | Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States | Creative Commons
although Peaya Cite has violated this license by removing the attribution.
While we’re on this subject, I think that there’s an additional question of what will happen as CSL begins to proliferate throughout commercial products. Will commercial developers who create their own CSL styles to supplement the styles that they have acquired from the repository keep those styles behind locked doors, or make those styles freely available for all to use? I would hope the latter—the amount of effort that Peaya, Mendeley, and others have saved by relying on open source styles likely far exceeds the amount of effort that they are likely to invest in creating their own, and giving back to the community seems like the right thing to do. But, short of moral obligations, I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do to make sure this happens.
Yeah, it just raises again a few issues, mostly centering on the csl
editor that Mendeley is working on, and that I wish all of could find
more time to pay attention to.
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I sent a bunch of list posts that all centered on our goals for
this project (do we consider it a priority to make it easier to edit
styles? who gets to edit them?), and criteria we might use to assess
design questions and such (how do we measure a successful design
featue?). To date, I’ve gotten zero response, which is frustrating. If
we can’t talk about goals and metrics, then we have a sure recipe an
unsuccessful project.
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The editor and repo question brings us back to licensing issues. I
suggest we only allow styles be licensed under terms consistent with
our goals (which has to be to enable reuse freely primarily).
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Related, I’m still wondering if along with this process, we want to
get specific about the sorts of distributed style vision I’ve been
talking about since the beginning, but which is very different than
what we’re seeing now: vendors just dumping hundreds of files in a
directory and shipping them as part of the download. E.g. with
examples like Peaya, they’re just thinking of these like static files,
rather than constantly updated objects created and maintained by a
community.
Frank also noted, BTW, that Sente is shipping CSL styles too. But in
that case, they have their own internal style model, and they convert
CSL to those. I wrote them, and they had some good reasons for not
wanting to be very high-profile about the CSL support ATM. They were
also interested in participating in CSL development if we had a “more
open” process (I explained they it is now open).
All of this is to say that it’d be really nice if we could get
everyone on the same page here. I guess the first step has to be to at
least start the conversation.
Bruce