Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication

Authors
Sarven Capadisli1
Amy Guy2🐦
David De Roure3🎸
Identifier
https://linkedresearch.org/events/www2017/workshop-proposal
In Reply To
WWW2017 Call for Workshops
Published
Modified
License
CC BY 4.0

Abstract

It is critical that scholarly communication and knowledge dissemination are not controlled by overpowered or centralised actors. The academic publishing ecosystem should be considered an ongoing conversation between experts, policy makers, implementers, and the general public. 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. This workshop intends to bring together practitioners and researchers from a variety of different backgrounds in order to articulate requirements and discuss interoperability of smaller, more domain-specific solutions.

Keywords

Introduction

The modern Web is ripe for use as a platform for academic publishing. Creating and hosting content is easier than ever, and social media has made sharing, critiquing and linking between things the norm. On the other hand, the connection to vast amounts of research globally makes it difficult to filter out relevant work, and the role of authoritative third-party gatekeepers has remained, despite the potential for greater publishing control and reach brought by new technologies. Dependence on these third-parties for demonstrating academic impact (and thus funding and career advancement) increases the urgency to publish, resulting in “publish or perish” and the shortened time horizon it brings [1, 2, 15].

There are many ways in which existing Web technology can be optimised for the scholarly communication use case, and allow researchers to take back control of the knowledge sharing pipeline. Open Web standards and their implementations for instance can be combined with cutting edge academic research and industry practices in other fields. However, stakeholders from all parts of the academic world are yet to cohesively express their requirements, and coordinate their efforts with specialists from relevant technical and scientific fields in order to materialise coherent and interoperable solutions.

Relevance

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 [3] and formal Web standards around decentralised social interactions and annotations have emerged in the past year [4, 5].

Further, the Web has already radically changed the processes of scholarship [6], and an increasing number of venues are accepting submissions and reviews in native Web formats [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Commitments to Open Access publishing made by institutions and venues is growing [13, 14]. Existing Workshops in related areas include FORCE11 (research accessibility, reproducibility, and taking advantage of digital capabilities), SAVE-SD (enhancing scholarly data with semantics, analytics and visualisations), and BigScholar (analysing and mining scholarly data), and Linked Science (to interconnect scientific assets).

Yet most researchers still find it difficult to take advantage of a more open landscape, or take up the challenges offered by their peers. We need a comprehensive look at what works and what is missing to allow researchers to seamlessly take full advantage of the Web as an empowering publication and collaboration platform.

Topics and Scope

The existing efforts mentioned previously are in line with our principles, but we seek to build on them with the position that taking advantage of 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 have the freedom to choose without being locked-in to particular systems.

As such, we discuss the whole academic publishing and knowledge dissemination pipeline in the context of the Web. While many smaller parts of this process are not specific or native to the Web, and we are interested in contributions from those who who want to integrate their solutions into a Web-based ecosystem for scholarly communication, and to find ways to connect and interoperate with solutions for other parts of the pipeline.

The Linked Research concepts and how they relate to one another is shown in the Linked Research ecosystem figure [16].

Linked Research ecosystem.

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.

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 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
    • Profiles and identity
  • 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
    • Rights and licensing
    • Feedback and reviews of academic work
    • Connecting scholarly data with other data
    • Analysis of argumentation and prose
    • Incentives and altmetrics
    • Semantics and Linked Data; Human and machine-readability

Contributions

Submissions 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 submissions 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 submit their contribution by publishing a document at a domain they control or have sufficient authority on the URL, e.g., personal site at an university, and sending us the URL. Submissions should be in a format which best conveys the authors’ message - use any stylesheets and scripts as appropriate! There are no typical ‘paper’ constraints, e.g., template, pages, words, font-size. Write for the Web and make it accessible.

We are accepting:

  • research reports (20 minutes);
  • demos of in-use tooling, techniques or solutions (10 minutes);
  • position statements outlining requirements or highlighting needs not met along a particular axis or in a particular domain, and proposed solutions (10 minutes);
  • 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. For in-person presentation during the WWW2017 workshop we propose the following deadlines:

  • Submissions due: 2017-01-07
  • Acceptance notification: 2017-01-31
  • Deadline for minor revisions: 2017-02-14
  • Blogposts accepted until: end of day before workshop day

Schedule

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.

Organisation

The workshop organisers are as follows:

  • Sarven Capadisli: a PhD student at the University of Bonn. His research involves statistical linked dataspaces, Linked Research, and dokieli. He is a co-chair of the SemStats workshop series at ISWC since 2013; and recently co-chaired the tutorial for Building Decentralized Social Web Applications at WWW2016. He is currently a co-editor of the W3C Linked Data Notifications specification. His research work is publicly accessible on his website. Over the past years, his advocacy to establish Webby research contributed towards a shift in conferences accepting ‘paper’ submissions in native Web formats.
  • Amy Guy: a PhD student researching decentralised Web technologies, in particular pertaining to the Social Web. She is working on standards and protocols for federating social interactions at the W3C. She co-chaired the tutorial for Building Decentralized Social Web Applications at WWW2016; regularly convened meetings of the Open Knowledge Foundation Scotland branch during 2014 and 2015; organised the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack annually from 2013 to 2015; and was local coordinator for the BCS Lovelace Colloquium in 2015. 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.

The following people have expressed interest in being on the program committee:

References

  1. Higgs, P.: Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system
  2. Vale, P., Karataglidis, S.: Pressure to publish is choking the academic profession, 2016, http://theconversation.com/pressure-to-publish-is-choking-the-academic-profession-62060
  3. Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open, 2016, http://www.decentralizedweb.net/
  4. W3C Social Web Working Group Charter, 2014, https://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/social-wg-charter.html
  5. W3C Web Annotation Working Group Charter, 2014, https://www.w3.org/annotation/charter/
  6. Borgman, C.: Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, 2007, ISBN 9780262026192, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/scholarship-digital-age
  7. Capadisli, S., Cotton, F., Haller, A., Kalampokis, E., Scannapieco, M., Troncy, R.: Semantic Statistics (SemStats), http://semstats.org/
  8. Gonzalez-Beltran, A., Osborne, F., Peroni, S.: Semantics, Analytics, Visualisation: Enhancing Scholarly Data (SAVE-SD), http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/
  9. Gentile, A., Zhang, Z., d'Amato, C., Paulheim, H.: Linked Data for Information Extraction (LD4IE), http://web.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/ld4ie2016/
  10. Bizer, C., Heath, T., Auer, S., Berners-Lee, T.: Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2016/
  11. Gil, Y.: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), http://iswc2016.semanticweb.org/pages/calls/html-submission.html
  12. Hartig, O., Sequeda, J., Hogan, A.: Consuming Linked Data (COLD), https://www.dcc.uchile.cl/cold2016/
  13. 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
  14. Dunn, K.: MIT Libraries can help researchers become "open in action", 2016, https://libraries.mit.edu/news/access-2/23377/
  15. Powell, K.: Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories, Nature News, 2016, http://www.nature.com/news/young-talented-and-fed-up-scientists-tell-their-stories-1.20872
  16. 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