Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication

The Web is increasingly being used to enable fair access to scholarly work, but bringing this to its full potential requires understanding of, and change in, a number of interrelated areas. Platforms for authoring and publishing research are only one part of a bigger picture, which also includes feedback and commentary, reputation and impact, searching and linking across projects and domains, and long-term archival of work.

• Decentralization
• Linked Data
• Open Access
• Semantic publishing
• Social machine
• Social web
• Web science

This workshop focuses on how academic researchers can leverage the Web as a technical platform for academic publishing, using existing Web technologies and standards, as well as take advantage of contemporary cultural norms around interacting, sharing and linking through social media. Despite the potential of the Web for greater control over publishing formats and reach to wider (non-academic) audiences, paper-based constraints, and dependencies on centralised third-parties for demonstrating academic impact remain.

We aim to bring together researchers in Web science and related fields to explore why, and discuss the latest efforts and challenges in creating coherent and interoperable solutions to these problems.

This workshop topic is timely due to increasing awareness of the power and control wielded by centralised actors in the online space. We take advantage of a wave of interest in redecentralizing the Web to highlight its importance in the academic domain. High profile events on the topic [1] and formal Web standards around decentralised social interactions and annotations have emerged in the past year [2, 3].

Further, the Web has already radically changed the processes of scholarship [4], and an increasing number of venues are accepting contributions and reviews in native Web formats [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Commitments to Open Access publishing made by institutions and venues is growing [11, 12]. Previous workshops e.g., FORCE11, SAVE-SD, BigScholar, Linked Science, SePublica focused on interlinking of scientific assets, reuse of datasets, analysis and visualisations.

Semantic Web researchers are experts in topics around data alignment and interoperability, and Linked Data principles are tightly in line with those of Open Access. It is pertinent that we apply this knowledge, alongside other knowledge from other domains, to take a comprehensive look at what works and what is missing in order for researchers to seamlessly take full advantage of the Web as an empowering publication and collaboration platform.

We build on prior efforts with the position that the decentralised nature of the Web is key to truly open scholarly communication. Integral to successful decentralisation is interoperability of diverse and independently created tools, so that individuals need not be locked-in to particular systems. This may be acheived in part through standard protocols for data representation and distribution.

The various parts of the schlarly communication ecosystem and how they relate to one another are shown in the ecosystem figure [13].

All parts of the process raise technical and social challenges. We expand the area of discussion beyond the research artefacts, to the infrastructure and culture which supports it. We are interested in input from those interested to integrate solutions (whether or not originally intended to interact with the Web) into a Web-based ecosystem for scholarly communication, and to find ways to connect and interoperate with solutions for other parts of the pipeline.

We invite contributions with strong emphasis on interoperability, decentralisation, and open access. Some topics of interest:

• Architecture and Decentralisation: Identifiers and versioning; Provenance and accountability; Persistence and permanence; Personal data stores; Information management.
• 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; Adaptation to audiences and contexts; Search and query of research objects and social interactions; Domain-specific publishing challenges.
• Create, Reuse, Remix, and Share: Social Web paradigms applied to scholarly communication; Social and cultural aspects of academic publishing; Profiles, identity, attribution; Rights and licensing; Feedback and reviews; Connecting scholarly data with other data; Incentives and altmetrics; Human and machine-readability.

Contributions will be evaluated according to how well they support advancing the state of the Web towards becoming a fully-fledged ecosystem for scholarly communication. We strongly promote self-dogfooding, and will prioritise contributions from authors who can demonstrate that they use their tooling or techniques in their own practice.

We also promote decentralisation and data ownership, and encourage participants to share their contribution by publishing a document at a domain over which they some authority. Contributions may be in any format, as best conveys the authors’ message. Accessible, social and interactive articles are encouraged. We welcome:

• research reports (20m)
• demos of in-use tooling, techniques or solutions (10m)
• position statements outlining requirements or highlighting needs not met along a particular axis or in a particular domain, and proposed solutions (10m)
• Short blog post style responses to “I can’t use the Web to publish my research because...” which we will use to seed discussion during the open session.

Our call for contributions and review process is ongoing throughout the year. We propose the following dates for in-person presentation at ESWC 2017:

• Contributions due: 2017-03-03
• Notifications: 2017-03-31
• Deadline for minor revisions: 2017-03-13
• Blogposts accepted until: end of day before workshop day

We propose a half-day workshop divided into three sections:

• Introduction and keynote (40 minutes)
• Presentations (1 hour 30 minutes; punctuated by coffee break)
• Discussion and plenary (50 minutes)

We hope to present five research reports at approx 15-20 minutes each (including questions), or four research reports and two 10 minute demos or position statements. The discussion session will be structured around the submitted blog posts as talking points, whether or not the authors are in attendance.

The workshop organisers are as follows:

• Sarven Capadisli: a PhD student researching statistical linked dataspaces, Linked Research, and dokieli. He is a co-chair of the SemStats workshop series at ISWC since 2013; recently co-chaired the tutorial for Building Decentralized Social Web Applications at WWW2016. His advocacy to establish Webby research contributed towards a shift in conferences accepting ‘paper’ contributions in native Web formats.
• Amy Guy: a PhD student researching decentralised Social Web technologies and standards. She co-chaired the tutorial for Building Decentralized Social Web Applications at WWW2016; and has regularly convened meetings of the OKF Scotland, and related hackathons and workshops. She publishers her research papers and thesis on her website, and invites input through open standard protocols for decentralised communication.
• David De Roure: is a Professor of e-Research at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Computing in the Oxford Martin School. From 2009 to 2013 he held the post of National Strategic Director for e-Social Science. He is currently a member of the FORCE11 board of directors.

As of 2016-11-18 70 people, listed at https://linkedresearch.org/calls, have expressed interest in being part of the programme committee.

1. Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open, 2016, http://www.decentralizedweb.net/
2. W3C Social Web WG Charter, 2014, https://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/social-wg-charter.html
3. W3C Web Annotation WG Charter, 2014, https://www.w3.org/annotation/charter/
4. Borgman, C.: Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, 2007, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/scholarship-digital-age
5. Capadisli, S., Cotton, F., Haller, A., Kalampokis, E., Scannapieco, M., Troncy, R.: Semantic Statistics (SemStats), http://semstats.org/
6. Gonzalez-Beltran, A., Osborne, F., Peroni, S.: Semantics, Analytics, Visualisation: Enhancing Scholarly Data (SAVE-SD), http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/
7. Gentile, A., Zhang, Z., d'Amato, C., Paulheim, H.: Linked Data for Information Extraction (LD4IE), http://web.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/ld4ie2016/
8. Bizer, C., Heath, T., Auer, S., Berners-Lee, T.: Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2016/
9. Gil, Y.: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), http://iswc2016.semanticweb.org/pages/calls/html-submission.html
10. Hartig, O., Sequeda, J., Hogan, A.: Consuming Linked Data (COLD), https://www.dcc.uchile.cl/cold2016/
11. Suber, P.,Brown, P. O., Cabell, D., Chakravarti, A., Cohen, B., Delamothe, T., Eisen, M., Grivell, L., Guédon, J-C., Hawley, R. S., Johnson, R. K., Kirschner, M. W., Lipman, D., Lutzker, A. P., Marincola, E., Roberts, R. J., Rubin, G. M., Schloegl, R., Siegel, V., So, A. D., Varmus, H. E., Velterop, J., Walport, M. J., Watson, L.: Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 2003, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4725199/suber_bethesda.htm
12. Dunn, K.: MIT Libraries can help researchers become "open in action", 2016, https://libraries.mit.edu/news/access-2/23377/
13. Capadisli, S., Guy, A., Lange, C., Auer, S., Greco, N.: Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication, 2016, http://csarven.ca/linked-research-scholarly-communication#figure-linked-research-ecosystem