Calls for Linked Research

There is no central authority to judge the value of your contributions. You do not need permission to publish! Control your own research and communication.

Linked Research is set out to socially and technically enable researchers to take full control, ownership, and responsibility of their knowledge, and have their contributions accessible to society at maximum capacity. Linked Research calls for dismantling the archaic and artificial barriers that get in the way of this.

There is no central authority to judge the value of your contributions. You do not need permission to publish! Control your own research and communication. The Web already enables you to be the publisher!

This is not something hypothetical or a dream for the future, it is completely possible today and there are ongoing initiatives and tooling to make it so.

Linked Research’s core goals:

• Publishing and ownership of documents and data
• Discovery and reuse of knowledge and data
• User experience and tooling

If you are an academic researcher, reconsider and question the tooling or rules that you are asked to follow e.g:

• Academic paywalls
• Information silos such as third-party publishers
• Strictly desktop or “paper user interfaces” e.g., (La)TeX, PDF/Word
• Blind reviews

We can work towards solutions where researchers can publish and consume research objects, as well as reviews and annotations that are open and both human and machine-friendly. If you support Open Access or Open Science philosophies, you're already half way there!

• Access: Publish your work under a webspace that you control and trust e.g., your personal website, at your institution's webspace given to you, or library, or even at your company.
• Linked Open Data: Make sure your articles and annotations are human and machine-readable, interlinked with other information out there.
• User Experience: Take your articles further and enrich with user interactions to better communicate your ideas. Think beyond the boring fixed, non-interactive views.
• Open communication: Announce your ideas and invite your community to give feedback. Give constructive feedback to others, publicly.

The scholarly communication process begins with conducting research and authoring reports, often collaboratively, including sourcing and citing related work, and reusing others’ data. Submitting reports for formal assessment by conference venues and journals permits verification and review of contributions, and allows a researcher to raise their profile and cement their expertise in the field. The review process allows academics to share their knowledge and remain abreast of work-in-progress and the current state of the art. Publications provide stable snapshots of projects and enable the aggregation of related work. Repositories and libraries provide persistent archives of work and interfaces for searching. Citation impact and altmetrics are used to determine the value of projects and the reputation of participants. Discoverability and reuse can be enhanced through adding machine readable semantics to published work, completing the cycle.

We invite contributions around (but not exclusive to) the following areas:

• Architecture and Decentralisation
  • Identifiers and versioning
  • Provenance and accountability
  • Persistence and permanence
  • Authentication and access control
  • Personal data stores and information management
  • Offline and online access
• Interfaces and Interactions
  • Authoring and collaboration
  • Web-based presentation of research
  • Data and metadata integration
  • Citation management, analysis, generation and prediction
  • Integration of semantics in prose and datasets
  • Learnability and adaptation to audiences and contexts
  • Search and query of research objects and social interactions
  • Domain-specific publishing challenges/solutions
• Create, Reuse, Remix, and Share
  • Social Web paradigms applied to scholarly communication
  • Social and cultural aspects of academic publishing
  • Promotion of and broadening access to academic research
  • Profiles, attribution, qualifications and reputation
  • Licensing
  • Feedback and reviews of academic work
  • Connecting scholarly data with other data, resources and contexts
  • Analysis of argumentation and prose
  • Incentives and altmetrics
  • Semantics and Linked Data; Human and machine-readability

Enabling Linked Research works best when dogfooded; the most interesting projects are the ones where the authors can demonstrate that they use their tooling or techniques in their own practice.

Researchers who are enabling Linked Research should also practice Linked Research. Decentralisation and data ownership are key, so you will share your contribution by publishing a document at a domain you control (or have authority over), and sending us the URL. Contributions should be in a format which best conveys your message, and there are none of the constraints associated with paper or print. Write for the Web; accessible, social and interactive articles are encouraged.

We are not gatekeepers, nor do we 'decide' if your work is worthy to be 'published'. You have already published it! Mission accomplished.

Many people have pledged to dedicate their time and expertise to reviewing work on this topic and providing feedback. All reviews will be transparent and open. In the interest of promoting dialogue and collaboration, as well as making sure reviewers get the acknolwedgement they deserve, there will be no anonymity in the process.

It wouldn't be a “Web first Call” if you didn't announce your work in response to the call with the state of the art eg:

curl -i -X POST -H'Content-Type: text/html' \
https://linkedresearch.org/inbox/linkedresearch.org/calls/ \
--data-raw '<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
  <title>“Title of Research Article” is a reply of “Call for Linked Research”</title>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  </head>
  <body>
  <p><cite><a href="http://example.org/research-article">Title of Research Article</a></cite> is a reply of <a about="http://example.org/research-article" rel="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#inReplyTo" href="https://linkedresearch.org/calls">Call for Linked Research</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>
'

curl -i -X POST -H'Content-Type: text/turtle' \
https://linkedresearch.org/inbox/linkedresearch.org/calls/ \
--data-raw '@prefix as: <https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#> .
@prefix oa: <http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
<> a as:Announce ;
  <http://schema.org/license> <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/> ;
  as:actor <http://csarven.ca/#i> ;
  as:object <http://example.org/research-article> ;
  as:target <https://linkedresearch.org/calls> ;
  as:updated "2016-11-07T11:47:52.852Z"^^xsd:dateTime .
<http://example.org/research-article>
  a oa:Annotation ;
  oa:motivation oa:replying .
'

curl -i -X POST -H'Content-Type: application/ld+json' \
https://linkedresearch.org/inbox/linkedresearch.org/calls/ \
--data-raw '{
  "@id":"http://example.org/research-article",
  "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#inReplyTo":
  { "@id": "https://linkedresearch.org/calls" }
}
'

The Call for Enabling Linked Research is an ongoing and online effort. However, watch the events list for upcoming opportunities to present your work in person. The next (pending acceptance) are: Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication at WWW2017, and Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication at ESWC 2017.