Legislation that has not kept abreast of changing technology can make the choice difficult.

As a philosopher, I write research papers, drafts of which are distributed on the web as PDFs. Open access to evolving research is important, and I am committed to it. Since I want to give my work the best chance of being understood, I take the time to properly typeset the PDFs with XeLaTeX. There is a problem, however, with distributing PDFs over the web.

PDF files can contain font information in a way that is easily extractable from the file. While the licensing of some type foundries allow embedded fonts in PDFs, many (especially smaller type foundries) do not. Indeed the ones that did probably did so at Adobe’s urging when PDF distribution on the web was relatively small and so not that great of a risk.

I would like to support small type foundries by buying their fonts. There are some brilliant type designers out there, and they should be rewarded. Unfortunately, since the main thing I want these fonts for is for web distributed PDFs, I can’t do that without violating licensing restrictions. And that’s not support.

There are of course open source fonts. Some of them are fine pieces of work. But the choice is limited, and important design decisions should not be so constrained.

DRM is not the answer, as the recent history of music distribution online sadly reveals.

I don’t know how to resolve this problem. It is partly technological, partly, legal. But I thought I would highlight for other academics who distribute their work online.

Upon finishing this post, I came across this essay that has more information about the legal and technological obstacles with some discussion of potential solutions.

sympoze is a social bookmarking site for philosophers. Currently in beta, sympoze is only open to professional philosophers and graduate students. Not only can you submit links but sympoze has the following features:

• Voting on submitted links
• User profiles
• Online status
• Instant messaging

Looks to be an excellent online resource if enough philosophers participate—and not just because a bookmark to one of my posts made it to the front page. ;)

Update Kieran posts about it here.

A paradigm shift in academic publishing is occurring—a move from dead tree sources to online resources. As I have had occasion to comment (here and here), this is a Good Thing™. However, the old paradigm is not without its virtues, perhaps not all of which will be preserved in the new paradigm.

Searching online is not like searching by other means. For all its advantages, sometimes something can be lost. For example, I find it much harder to browse for DVDs on Amazon than it was browse for them in a DVD store. A certain potential for fortuitous serendipity has been noticeably diminished. With respect to dead tree journals, it was convenient to go to the departmental library and flip through the new journals for a good sense of what was coming out. My departmental library, however, has been canceling subscriptions as our university library is making these journals available online. Sensible, but a lost opportunity for browsing.

Now for the forehead slapping. Most journals that publish material online provide convenient RSS feeds of recent issues. (Most but not all—the venerable Journal of Philosophy doesn’t. I must write to the editor about this, and I encourage philosophers out there to do the same.) I spent twenty minutes this afternoon subscribing to feeds. Now I can browse recent issues from my newsreader in my office. Why didn’t I think of this before? The paradigm shift is still ongoing. And even I, as an editor who has actively promulgated it (by instituting a new publishing model for the Aristotelian Society with more to come) can yet remain blind to the obvious possibilities.

When I am done filling out my subscriptions, I will post a list of philosophy feeds.

Consider direct quotation—no easy phenomena. Part of the point of citation, here, is so that the reader can read the quotation in context, to decide for themselves whether the quoted author has been misrepresented. The usual case is to quote from a dead tree source—a printed book or journal. Imagine if books were quite different than from the way they actually are. Suppose that every time a book is closed the text would change, sometimes subtlely, sometimes less so. When your intrepid reader tracks down your citation, the quote may or may not be there. What would be the point? There would be very little, if any, point at all. The requisite stability would be missing from texts that spontaneously morph.

One good thing about dead tree sources is that they don’t change in this way. But now consider delivering text online. It is easy to change HTML or upload a new version of a PDF. The nature of the medium does not guarantee the stability guaranteed by ink on a page. Instead of natural law, we have the moral law. We must rely—God help us—on trust. This is manifest in bloggers’ convention of striking through changed text in a post. Leaving a trace of a misspelled word, a hasty judgment, or mal mot is a sign of good faith, and bloggers who depart from this convention are subject to (verbal) sanction in comments or in pingback posts.

As the delivery of academic journals is moving increasingly online, editors face a corresponding moral challenge. The Aristotelian Society publishes papers online before the print volume hits the stands. Once an author asked to change his article after the online version went live but before the print volume was typeset. What was the problem? Things change online all the time!—he implored. The problem was simple. It would violate a precondition for the possibility of citation.

This form allows you to retrieve Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for journal articles, books, and chapters by simply cutting and pasting the reference list into the box below. You may use the form with any reference style, although the tool works most reliably if references are formatted in a standard style such as shown in this example:

Clow GD, McKay CP, Simmons Jr. GM, and Wharton RA, Jr. 1988. Climatological observations and predicted sublimation rates at Lake Hoare, Antarctica. Journal of Climate 1:715-728.

To test the interface, simply cut & paste this reference!

Please separate individual references by a blank line. For best results, there should be no line breaks within an individual reference. When submitting multiple references they must be in alphabetical order or presented as a numbered list. For editorial purposes, to check the accuracy of a reference click on the DOI link that is returned with the reference.