Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication

The purpose of this workshop is the mobilisation of a core group of researchers and practitioners to investigate the core characteristics of a minimal viable platform for scholarly communication that is researcher-centric, interlinked, and web-native. As visible outcomes, this workshop aims to deliver initial insights regarding these core characteristics and will determine the most appropriate approach to engage in a sustained effort aimed at tackling technical challenges and promoting adoption of solutions.

• Decentralization
• Interoperability
• Linked Data
• Open science
• REST
• Semantic publishing
• Social web
• Web science

A concise title.

Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication

The names, affiliations and contact information of the organizers. A typical workshop should count no more than three co-chairs affiliated with different organizations.

• Sarven Capadisli, University of Bonn, info@csarven.ca, http://csarven.ca/#i
• Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, herbertv@lanl.gov, http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
• Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, wh@ecs.soton.ac.uk, http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wh/

Proposed duration of the workshop – half or full day. The organizers may exceptionally consider well justified 2-day workshops.

A half day workshop, with a possible request to have it full day depending on contributions.

Preference for a date; but, the proposal must not be conditioned on the workshop date, since it is likely that some workshops will not get their preferred date.

2018-04-24

A statement of the workshop: objective/goals.

The workshop’s objective is to bring to the fore perspectives, architectures, proposed components and overall solutions for a minimal viable platform for scholarly communication. The platform should at the same time make scholarly information available and reusable by means of interoperable, decentralised, web-based solutions and fulfil the core functions of scholarly communication (registration, awareness, certification, archiving). The workshop’s goal is to continue paving the way for a scholarly commons where contributors have ownership of their works (eg articles, peer-reviews), decide on licenses and access controls, and provide ways that support discovery, reuse and exchange of their works via interoperable mechanisms. This workshop builds on the Linked Research principles for scientific and scholarly information on the Web.

A statement detailing: Why is the workshop topic important? Why is the workshop timely? How is it relevant to WWW?

Since the early days of the Internet and the Web, it has been recognised that the new technologies would enable the emergence of novel scholarly communication approaches (cf. Smith’s deconstructed journal, Ginsparg’s decoupling of publishing and review in arXiv.org, Harnad’s subversive proposal). To this date, however, the potential has only been marginally harnessed. Among others, due to the availability of a new realm of standards and technologies (eg resulting from W3C Social Web and Linked Data activities), the time is right to take stock and launch a concerted effort aimed at profound innovation. Crucial components seem to be in place to start working towards a researcher-centric, interlinked, web-native scholarly communication system.

The topic is important because there is general agreement regarding the need to pursue an ecosystem where results of publicly-funded scientific endeavours are openly accessible and reusable for everyone. Many activities towards this goal are ongoing (cf Open Access, FORCE11, OSI), some of which have been for many years. But most focus on important economic, legal, and policy matters yet shy away from technology. This workshop is informed and inspired by these activities and aims to add a technical voice to them. This workshop is relevant to The Web Conference because it explores a fundamental innovation of scholarly communication, which to date largely remains a scanned version of the paper-based journal system, by means of web standards and technologies. The Web Conference is an appropriate venue for this workshop due to the presence of international experts that can inform the discussion.

A two-paragraph description of the workshop topic and themes.

The overarching topic for the workshop is web-based scholarly communication and its focus is on discussing how web standards and technologies can be used to achieve a minimal viable platform to establish a scholarly commons that meets the core requirements of a scholarly communication system, i.e. registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, and that is accessible to both humans and machines.

Five invited speakers will share their perspective on such a minimal viable platform, addressing either the overall architecture of a possible future scholarly commons or zooming in on core components that can fit in such an architecture. In both cases, significant attention will be paid to enabling technologies and standards both existing and, if need be, to be devised. In addition, contributions (articles, abstracts, demos) are solicited that align with the overarching topic and focus, but possibly zoom in further into specifics of innovative approaches to address authoring, dissemination, reviewing, discovering, archiving, and generally interacting with information in a scholarly commons.

If the workshop was conducted before, where and when was it conducted? Please give details on number of attendees, number of submissions, and acceptance ratio. List any other related or same workshops being conducted in the same year, or were conducted, at any other venues.

This workshop is a variation on our Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication which was last conducted at ESWC 2017 as a half-day workshop, having approximately 30 attendees, 4 peer-reviewed articles, 3 alternative contributions, and open discussions. All contributions: articles and peer-reviews, are controlled by their respective authors at their own Webspace and archived. See the program (https://linkedresearch.org/events/eswc2017/) with links to all works.

Based off the Linked Research initiative, the following workshops have integrated its approach to contributions: Linked Data on the Web workshop series at WWW, Web Observatories, Social Machines and Decentralisation workshop at WWW 2017, Decentralizing the Semantic Web and Enabling Open Semantic Science workshops at ISWC 2017.

A description of the workshop format: How many papers do you hope to present, how many invited speakers, type of activities (eg. short paper presentation, invited talks, demos, posters, etc.), and an approximate timeline (breaks should be synchronized with scheduled breaks if possible.)

• All presentations will be 15 minutes including discussion.
• We plan to have 5 invited talks and 5 presentations on reviewed and demonstrable articles.
• Contributions can be of any length and form for both articles and reviews provided that they are accessible and consumable on the Web.
• Timeline:
  • 09:00 — 09:15: Introduction / Keynote
  • 09:15 — 10:30: Invited talks and discussions
  • 10:30 — 11:00: Break
  • 11:00 — 12:30: Contributions and discussions

A description of how workshop submissions will be evaluated, and a tentative PC list (with indication of whether PC members have already been contacted and/or have expressed interest.)

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 they control or have sufficient authority on the URL, eg. personal site at an university, and sending us the URL. Contributions SHOULD be in formats which best conveys the authors’ message. For example, use of HTML(+RDFa), CSS, JavaScript, and the rest of the Web stack, is highly encouraged. There are no typical ‘paper’ format constraints, eg. template, pages, words, font-size. Contributions MUST be made for and accessible from the Web.

Open and attributed reviews may be held by anyone. There is list of potential reviewers (74 people at this time) from our Linked Research community at https://linkedresearch.org/calls#reviewers that have expressed to provide open reviews relevant to their areas of interest.

An indication on whether the workshop registration will be open to all interested registered parties or limited.

Open to all.

A short bio of the workshop organizers, including a description of their qualifications relative to the topic area, and past experience in organizing/facilitating workshops or research meetings.

• Sarven Capadisli’s research includes the Linked Research initiative and the dokieli. project. He is one of the chairs of SemStats (ISWC), Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication (ESWC), Linked Data on the Web and Workshop on Web Observatories, Social Machines and Decentralisation (WWW) workshop series.
• Herbert Van de Sompel is the team leader of the Prototyping Team at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. More about Herbert at Wikipedia and LANL bio.
• Professor Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton, UK) DBE, FRS, FREng is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and was Dean of the Faculty of Physical Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2014. She was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) from 2002 to 2007. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at its forefront ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science. She is now Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at Southampton. She was President of the ACM from 2008-2010, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology from 2004-2010 and a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. She is currently a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance and the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on AI and Robotics. She holds many fellowships including Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the ACM.