Commentarium on Open Access to Research

Publication Websites = Publisites

Erik Sandewall


Many researchers design websites that contain a list of their research articles, and possibly also with links to the full text of many of those articles. In this note I want to promote a different although related concept, namely the idea that a website itself ought to be considered as a publication provided that it is designed in the appropriate fashion. I propose to use the term publisite for a website that is organized and used in this way.

Motivation

[This section is forthcoming]

Design Issues

[This section is forthcoming]

Quality control

Modern science has developed sophisticated systems for quality control of research articles, in particular through the system of peer-reviewed journals and (in some fields) conferences. Through the rules and conventions for citation of earlier work, it also has mechanisms for reducing duplicate work and for giving credit to the originators of new ideas and results.

Publication websites, or publisites also need such mechanisms in order to serve properly for communication and archive of research results. It is however not possible to transfer the review system and the citation conventions unchanged; they have to be adapted to the characteristic properties of publisites, namely, that they are potentially large aggregates of information where components are added and changed at the scale of months and years.

The forthcoming, full text of the present webpage will contain proposals for how this can be done.

An example

The present COAR website is in fact a small example of a publisite. It exhibits many of the properties that were (will be) discussed above as important aspects of publisite design, such as the independent citability of constituent parts, the use of e.g. menus for providing overview of contents, and the preservation of history of constituent parts.

A larger example of a publisite with the same characteristics is provided by the author's CAISOR website.

[Additional text to be added to this page.]


Posted on 2006-08-16 as part of the CAISOR website. [Version history].
the scientific community.