Bibliography Style

[leeper]

Do we have a style guide for bibliographies? Obviously most of this is handled correctly automatically, but I've noticed we're inconsistent on author names. Do we expect full first names for full authors, or just initials, or are we indifferent?

[arfon]

Following on from a related discussion in openjournals/whedon#2, I'm definitely open to switching citation styles. It looks like we would need to:

1. Pick a new style from this list
2. Updated Whedon to pass --csl=FILE when compiling the PDF (see http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#citation-rendering)

Thoughts @openjournals/joss-editors @openjournals/jose-editors?

[pdebuyl]

I added -M "csl=apa.csl" to the pandoc call in the Makefile here https://gist.github.com/mhucka/5ecb18aa2fd088c055de07366f70135e and that worked well. The apa style is close to the current one and seems consistent with respect to author names.

[arfon]

@pdebuyl - thanks! Point of clarification, did you actually download (and have available) a file called apa.csl or was it already available on your machine?

[pdebuyl]

I downloaded the file from the link above. I see that the license is CC by share-alike which may pose problems. There might be alternative apa files though, I'll give it a look.

[pdebuyl]

There is no easy to find source of loosely licensed csl files. I cannot understand the phrasing of CC-BY-SA with respect to the distribution of unmodified content.

From https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Does distributing an unmodified copy of a file falls under "remix, transform, or build upon the material"? If yes, we cannot use them.

[pdebuyl]

Excerpt from the CC-BY-SA license:

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made
   subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
   .
   You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of
   this License. You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource
   Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You
   Distribute or Publicly Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on
   the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the
   recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient
   under the terms of the License. You may not sublicense the Work. You
   must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the
   disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work You Distribute or
   Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You
   may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that
   restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the
   rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. This
   Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but
   this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be
   made subject to the terms of this License.

The last part is what interests us:

This
Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but
this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be
made subject to the terms of this License.

If I understand well, we can distribute the file provided that

1. It is unmodified (we cannot make any change, else our "apa.csl" becomes a derivative.
2. We must keep the license info for apa.csl (which might seem obvious :-) ). A URL to the text of the license is sufficient according to the quote above.

I don't know how to organize a project that ships files whose license are different. By random browsing of projects, I know that @ctb 's lab includes sections in the license file as here.

[pdebuyl]

As further information, the software https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc-ruby , that is dual licensed under the AGPL and the FreeBSD license, distributes apa.csl as is. The author is part of the zotero organization, which I suppose is a bit of a better example than other random repositories.