Journal of Citable Internet Content

New product idea …

I wrote an article recently which was a well thought through and a referenced effort. And yet it was only published on my own website repository (on Issu in this case), with a shorter version in an online newspaper (the Conversation) that pointed to the original article, as well as a radio interview with ABC Radio National.

Now this got me thinking – there is no formal reference to this article so it would be hard for others to cite. Sure you can use a web address but there is no guarantee that in a couple of year’s time that the web-link will still be valid or the content the same.

So what we need is a virtual online journal where people can drop their articles and get an actual formal reference that is good for all time, and also a permanent web repository for the article in addition to wherever else it is stored.

By this approach other people can actually cite these articles within (or without) the academic system if they choose to.

The problem that is being solved here is that not everyone really wants to go through the tedious process of getting an article peer reviewed in order to get a journal reference. Especially if it is a field where one doesn’t normally practice nor does one have an academic profile. But if you don’t publish it to a proper journal then it’s difficult to usefully have these articles cited; a web address or WordPress address just doesn’t cut it.

Further, content published this way could remain the copyright of the author or even convert to commons. Both are better than handing over rights to a for-profit academic journal that doesn’t even pay you for the privilege.

Going one step further, if I was writing a paper and I wanted to cite something that I found on the web, then I would like to be able to drop it into this system. For example, if I wanted to cite a Wiki, knowing that Wiki morphs over time wouldn’t it be nice to be able to automatically drop today’s version of Wiki into a service that keeps a copy of today’s version of the website forever, together with a readily usable citation reference.

One might wonder about copyright issues. Of course the whole thing would have to be commons, and maybe the physical service could be set up on a floating boat or in New Guinea just to make sure no one complains.

I imagine this service being a hosted site where you simply paste in the link to the article of interest and it’s automatically sucked up into a cloud server, bundled into some un-morphable pdf-like format for people to download, and given a journal reference. Let’s call it the Journal of Citable Internet Content.

Time for Google to step up.