WebCite Information

Simply put, WebCite® aims to make Internet material (any sort of digital objects) more "citable", long-term accessible, and hence more acceptable for scholarly purposes. Without WebCite®, Internet citations are deemed ephemeral and therefore are often frowned upon by authors and editors. However, it does not make much sense to ignore opinions, ideas, draft papers, or data published on the Internet (including wikis and blogs), not acknowledging them only because they are not "formally" published, and because they are difficult to cite. The reality is that in the age of the Internet, "publication" is a continuum, and it makes little sense to not cite (therefore acknowledge) for example the idea of a scholarly blogger, the collective wisdom of a wiki, ideas from an online discussion paper, or data from an online accessible dataset only because online material is not deemed "citable". By making Internet material more "citable" (and also by creating incentives such as mechanisms and metrics for measuring the "impact" of online material by calculating and publishing WebCite® impact factor), we hope that this will encourage scholars to publish ideas and data online in a wide range of formats, which in turn should accelerate and facilitate the exchange of scientific ideas. While we do see the value of scholarly peer-reviewed journals for publishing research results (many of us are editors and publishers of peer-reviewed journals ourselves!), we also acknowledge that much of the scientific discourse takes place before it is "formally" published, and that peer-review can also take on other forms (e.g. post-publication peer-review, which is something WebCite® plans to implement). Another broader societal aspect of the WebCite® initiative is advocacy and research in the area of copyright. We aim to develop a system which balances the legitimate rights of the copyright-holders (e.g. cited authors and publishers) against the "fair use" rights of society to archive and access important material. We also advocate and lobby ...