Re: Shopping for research venues

Hi Andrea,

All great points, thanks. My comments inline:

On 03/20/2013 01:11 PM, Andrea Splendiani wrote:
> You would need a few things:
> 1) A guarantee that the content at the page doesn't change without notice, so that comments/judgements refer to the correct thing. You can use some checksum-based method for this.

I think it is important to be clear on where the comments are made. A 
blog post with an open comment system is a great invitation for all 
reviewers and to the Web as a whole.

While I understand the motive behind what you mention, there is already 
a well adopted convention on the Web for articles and its replies. 
Authors mark their documents with what's updated, or put a timestamp on 
last edit.

I realize that doesn't stop any author from updating and neglecting to 
put a notice as such, however, putting some level of trust on this 
situation is no different than what we already do: comments on the Web 
almost always reflect the state of the article it was in. And if 
something feels a bit fishy, guess what happens?

Okay, so, a simple workaround this for reviewers off-the-Web is to save 
a copy of the document to local disk (whether it is in HTML or output to 
PDF) and carry on the review from there. I think that's as reliable as 
it gets for reviewing the submitted version.

> 2) Some consistent format and annotation, to facilitate search. Not only from a computational perspective, we rely on some pattern (abstract/methods/result) to quickly scan some artifact. So ok, we can have some guidelines the research paper need to comply to (so we need a sort of validator).

There are numerous vocabularies at our disposal which can be used in 
HTML+RDFa, for general document descriptions e.g., dcterms, to 
journals/paper/bibliographic coverage e.g., sempublishing.

Yet, if research venues are compelled to take this approach, it wouldn't 
be difficult to either start accepting what's already out there, or a 
collaborative effort from participating venues to simply request the 
documents to use a particular vocabulary when "papers" are submitted.

> 3) Some guarantee of persistency. That could be supplemented by an established archives that can resolve dead URLs....

And, nothing stops venues from having a copy of the submitted version 
either which would also help the discovery of research findings.

> 4) A peer review sort of system, that in this case could be post-publication, maybe coupled with some new metrics.

Open comments: similar to Semantic Web Journal.

Reviews can also be done on the comment form of each article (research). 
If the authors or their institutions don't have their own Webspace, the 
venues could publish it on their behalf.

It also makes it possible for everyone to discover and contribute to 
research. A comment system open to the whole community (wisdom of the 
crowd and all) will always be better than 2-3 reviewers.

In addition to that, by employing even something simple as 
dcterms:reference on referenced work, some metrics can be derived.

> 5) A selection criteria could be useful as well.

I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you elaborate?

> I'm sure you know: http://figshare.com. They store different things (not executable), but no peer-review associated.
> For executable content, beside Javacript&webby thing, it could make sense to publish virtual machines these days.

I didn't know about figshare but I've come across similar efforts. I 
agree that this would be *great*.


The way I see it is that, we have the technology and the expertise. This 
is not the problem core. Research venues demanding PDF for SW/LD work is.

-Sarven

> Il giorno 20/mar/2013, alle ore 11:36, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca>
>   ha scritto:
>
>> Dear community,
>>
>> I would like to know which venues (e.g., conferences, journals) are out there that accepts research documents in (X)HTML+CSS+JavaScript+MathML+SVG etc. as the primary and final format. On that note, which accepts an HTTP URI of the research?
>>
>> As far as I know, there are none out there, but I want to be wrong about this!
>>
>> What I'm hoping for are a bunch of things:
>>
>> Although not ultimately necessary, a venue to submit to that would have some weight given "reviewed and approved" stamps.
>>
>> Not being at the mercy of classical publishers needs when it comes to sharing knowledge given the technologies that we have at our disposal.
>>
>> In the absence of such forward-looking venues, I would love to see an open discussion on what's really needed to make it happen and be it the default approach when it comes to sharing research findings. Pragmatic approaches are always welcome, so, this doesn't have to be about "how to we make all scholarly publishing get on the Web?", but rather for starters, "how do we make scholarly work of Linked Data and Semantic Web researchers and practitioners get on the Web"?
>>
>> I don't mean to belittle or overlook the hard work that some groups are already actively involved in e.g., Semantic Web Journal, Semantic Web Dog Food, FORCE11. I'm merely looking for more out of this community.
>>
>> For those that this sounds desirable, please voice yourself because there are indeed many like you!
>>
>> Humbly yours,
>>
>> -Sarven
>> http://csarven.ca/#i
>>
>
>
>
>