[UPS] <journal> journal

[Stevan Harnad]

Hi all,

Another Santa Fe afterthought -- or rather an amplification of
something I regret that I said so tentatively and diminutively
at the end of the minimalist tag-session:

I think it would be a GREAT mistake not to include <journalname>
among our absolute minimal tag set (along with author, title, etc.).

Carl generated the minimal set off the top of his head -- and it's a
good head, that has thought about these matters a lot.

But from the point of view of a minimal set of tags -- with a maximum
of, say, 7 -- I would certainly find much less use for two mandatory date
tags than a mandatory journalname tag (which, by default, for preprint
would be NULL).

After all, the journal literature is our primary constituency, and
journalname is one of its most informative descriptors.

I sensed that the motivation for not including it among the minimal set
was an expectation or desire on the part of soime of us that journals
might cease to exist -- plus some untested notions about what "vetting"
systems might replace them, again, on the part of some of us.

I think it would be a great mistake to leave one of the most robust,
representative and useful descriptors out of our minimal set, on the
basis of this sort of speculative hypothesis and desideratum (with
which many of us may not be in agreement).

So I vote that journalname be included as a mandatory field in the
minimal set (including NULL for not-submitted-to-a-journal). 

If even the minimal self-archives have the journal field, then something
even as simple as Alta Vista could be sent to retrieve the (minimal) archival
presence of any or every refereed journal: an extremely important and
appealing feature that could hasten everything we hope for (including
the demise of the journals, if that is fated to occur, after first having
drawn their contents up into the skies).

Chrs, Stevan
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Stevan Harnad                     harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science                  fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton         http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton            http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
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