Academic citation practices need to be modernized

"’Legacy’ referencing marginalizes open access texts. What is the essential purpose of academic referencing? ...A completely out of date answer dominates current practice  — namely...[directing readers] to the same precise sources and pages that you yourself used in constructing an argument or a case. In this sense referencing is about replicability (ascertaining that a cited source actually exists and says what you says it says), as well as about correctly assigning credit, or (far less commonly) criticizing inadequate work.

"But in the digital era this is too limited an ambition. Referencing should instead be about directly connecting readers to the full text of your sources, ideally in a one-stop way....In other words, modern referencing is not about pointing to some source details for books that cost a small fortune and are buried away in some library where the reader is not present; still less about pointing to source details for an article in a pay-wall journal to which readers do not have access....

"With open access spreading now we can all do better, far better, if we follow one dominant principle. Referencing should connect readers as far as possible to open access sources, and scholars should in all cases and in every possible way treat the open access versions of texts as the primary source...."