Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication

Authors
Sarven Capadisli1
Amy Guy2🐦
David De Roure3🎸
Identifier
https://linkedresearch.org/events/iswc2017/workshop-proposal
In Reply To
ISWC 2017 Call for Workshops
Notifications Inbox
inbox/
Published
Modified
License
CC BY 4.0

Abstract

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. Semantic Web technologies are key when it comes to authoring and publishing research and data, as well as feedback and commentary, reputation and impact, long-term archival of work, and searching and linking across projects and domains. This workshop seeks to bring together people working on different parts of the academic publishing pipeline with the specific goal of enabling interoperability between disparate projects through semantics and native Web standards. We also provide a forum for articulating concrete problems with the current academic publishing model, and proposing solutions.

Keywords

Introduction

This workshop focuses on how academic researchers can leverage the Web as a technical platform for academic publishing using existing Web technologies and standards, whilst taking advantage of contemporary cultural Social Web norms around interacting, sharing and linking. 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 persist.

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 would be the 2nd occurance of this workshop; the 1st is scheduled for ESWC2017 in May. For the purposes of this proposal we consider it 'emerging'.

Relevance and Motivations

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 - many using Semantic Web technologies - 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, including ISWC itself. Commitments to Open Access publishing made by institutions and venues is growing [16, 6]. Previous workshops at similar conferences e.g., FORCE11, SAVE-SD, BigScholar, Linked Science, SePublica focused on interlinking of scientific assets, reuse of datasets, analysis and visualisations, but not on the publishing pipeline as a whole, using Web standards and semantics for connecting the pieces together, nor the critical connection with academic culture.

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 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.

The focus with regard to technology is on connecting partial or specialised solutions together in order to advance the publishing pipeline as a whole. For this, bringing people together to discuss their work in person in order to find points of alignment is crucial.

Topics and Scope

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 scholarly communication ecosystem and how they relate to one another are shown in the ecosystem figure [5].

Scholarly communication ecosystem.

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 existing or in-progress technologies (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 when applied specifically to scholarly communication:

  • 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.

Audience and Community

We anticipate attendance of 15 to 20 people, including Web standards advocates who want to apply particular standards to the academic publishing area; people who are interested in learning about tools and techniques for publishing their research online (we particularly anticipate this to be of interest to students and early-stage researchers who are looking for best-practice workflows for publishing); conference or journal committee members who wish to make their publications and proceedings more open and Web-friendly; and we also expect to attract folks who have grievences with or want to improve the academic publishing industry in general.

Existing communities with related publications include Open Access / Open Science [8, 9, 15, 16] and semantic publishing [10, 12, 13, 14, 17], as well as seeking to better understand and improve academic publishing or research landscapes [7, 11, 18].

Workshop Format

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 welcome:

  • short research reports
  • demos of in-use tooling, techniques or solutions
  • position statements outlining requirements or highlighting needs not met along a particular axis or in a particular domain, and proposed solutions
  • 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.

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)

Organisation

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 2017-03-16 74 people, listed at https://linkedresearch.org/calls#reviewers, have expressed interest in reviewing articles on this topic on an ongoing basis.

References

  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., 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
  6. Dunn, K.: MIT Libraries can help researchers become "open in action", 2016, https://libraries.mit.edu/news/access-2/23377/
  7. Klein M., Van de Sompel, H., Sanderson, R., Shankar, H., Balakireva, L., Zhou, K., Tobin, R.: Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot, PLoS ONE, 2014, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
  8. Kuhn, T., Chichester, C., Krauthammer, M., Dumontier, M.: Publishing without Publishers: a Decentralized Approach to Dissemination, Retrieval, and Archiving of Data, ISWC 2015, http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/sites/iswc2015.semanticweb.org/files/93660593.pdf
  9. Martone M. (ed.): Data Citation Synthesis Group: Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. FORCE11, https://www.force11.org/datacitation
  10. Mons, B., Velterop, J.: Nano-Publication in the e-science era, Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse, 2009, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-523/Mons.pdf
  11. Osborne, F., Scavo, G., Motta, E.: Identifying diachronic topic-based research communities by clustering shared research trajectories, Research Track, ESWC (2014), http://oro.open.ac.uk/39666/3/ESWC2014_CR
  12. Peroni, S: The Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies. In Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing: 121-193. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04777-5_5
  13. Peroni, S., Osborne, F., Di Iorio, A., Nuzzolese, A. G., Poggi, F., Vitali, F., Motta, E. (2016). Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles. PeerJ PrePrints 4: e2513. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2513
  14. Procter, R., Williams, R., Steward, J., Poschen, M., Snee, H., Voss, A., Asgari-Targhi, M.: Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 2010(368):4039-4056, DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2010.0155, http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1926/4039
  15. Shotton, D.: The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles - a Framework for Article Evaluation, 2012, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 18, Number 1/2
  16. 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
  17. de Waard, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Carusi, A., Park, J., Samwald, M. and Sándor, Á.: Hypotheses, Evidence and Relationships: The HypER Approach for Representing Scientific Knowledge Claims, Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse, 2009, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-523/
  18. Wicherts, J. M.: Peer Review Quality and Transparency of the Peer-Review Process in Open Access and Subscription Journals, 2016, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147913, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147913