Re: scientific publishing process (was Re: Cost and access)

Hi,
A Ginsu Knives variation for your consideration ... 

On two different W3 mailing lists, this broken process generated 13 responses in less than five hours on a Friday (today); Sarven's thread (subject: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper) generated over 50 responses in 48 hours! And the ePub Working Group (and Digital Publishing Activity) hasn't even chimed in  (yet).[1]  I suspect they'll have some thoughts.

Clearly, many of us recognize the issue & want to find a better approach.  There is a great business opportunity here, (and no, I promise not to wire you $100M if you send me your bank details).  I have a proposal to advance the discussion on fixing the broken scientific publishing process.

We'd do ourselves a huge favor if we showed (STM) publishing executives why this Linked Data stuff matters anyway.  Conference organizers will do what is cheap (for them) & easy for their customers (researchers submitting content). My proposal recognizes the reality that researchers must publish within the ecosystem (rules) that the publishers prescribe, but also does something to advance [publicly | privately] funded research by making stuff webby.

Do we agree:

1) PDF works well for (STM) publishers who require fixed page display;

2) PDF doesn't take advantage of the advances we've made in machine readability;

3) In fact, PDFs suck on eBook readers which are all about flexible page layout; and

4) We already have the necessary Web Standards to address the problem, so no need to recreate the wheel.


--> I propose we work from the Web standards down to what the conference & scholarly publishing industries need, rather than LaTeX up.

Do people agree with the following NEED statement?

--> Produce a Web-based tool that allows researchers to share their [privately | publicly ] funded knowledge and produces a variety of outputs: LaTeX, PDF and carries with it a machine readable representation.


Do people agree with the following SOLUTION approach?

The international standards to solve this exist. Standards from W3C and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).[2]  Use (X)HTML for generalized document creation/rendering. Use CSS for styling. Use MathML for formulas. Use JS for action. Use RDF to model the metadata within HTML.  

The standards exist. We can iron out the details such as which RDF serializations, which vocabularies to use, etc.  

I propose a 'walk before we run' approach but do better than basic metadata (i.e., title, author name, institution, abstract).  Link to other scholarly communities/projects such as Vivo.[3]  Give it that linked data 'wow' factor that isn't hard to do & will give publishing execs an "ah ha!" moment.  All the data contained in a paper need not be available in machine readable format on day #1 (sorry Kingsley ;-). Small is beautiful until there is momentum, then scale fast!!

We've got to show the 1,200 lb gorillas (STM publishers) why they want to come over to our part of the forest ... it isn't enough to stay with PDF to facilitate typesetting in 2015!  The Web has moved on & so must the publishers.  

Publishers have put the burden on authors to tag content, figure out an arcane mark up language and submit our work product to make the publisher's typesetting easier.  

Bottom line:

Appeal to the STM publishers. Help them to make money.  Help them to stop the hemorrhaging customers. Move them into the 21st Century.  Help us all to stop recreating the wheel.

--> Create an easy to use Web-based service that lightens the load of the researcher.  Anything we do must be better than LaTeX in terms of ease-of-use. Again, the standards exist, and there are a number of them, to do the markup & still produce the beloved PDF & machine readable data (metadata).

Publishers will make more money because their customers which include researchers & universities, will be able to discover, access and re-use data liberated from the 20th Century PDF.

Take-away:

If ever there was a useful product to build using Linked Data, THIS is the use case you've been looking for -- Produce a web-based offering that helps researchers publish & submit papers in a variety of formats, suitable for humans and machines.  Get funding to build it fast! Your 'secret sauce' are Web standards. You'll have many eyeballs fast if the last 72 hours is any indication of how many people would use such a publishing platform. 

Talk to publishers, then build the product.  Lots of people will use it. Make money along the way.  We'll all have made the world slightly better. 

Best of all -- you'll be 1) a hero; and 2) wealthy if you have any business acumen whatsoever.  Important safety tip:  Do not spell RDF to your investors (ask me how I know ;-)  

Cheers,

Bernadette Hyland
CEO, 3 Round Stones, Inc.

http://3roundstones.com
http://about.me/bernadettehyland 

PS.  If you do this well, I'll personally throw in a set of Genuine Ginsu Knife Set.[4]

PPS. I'm happy to iterate this idea with those interested.

[1] http://www.w3.org/dpub/

[2] http://idpf.org/about-us

[3] http://vivoweb.org/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginsu

On Oct 3, 2014, at 1:25 PM, Diogo FC Patrao <djogopatrao@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
> One problem with allowing HTML submission is ensuring that reviewers can correctly view the submission as the authors intended it to be viewed.  How would you feel if your paper was rejected because one of the reviewers could not view portions of it?  At least with PDF there is a reasonably good chance that every paper can be correctly viewed by all its reviewers, even if they have to print it out.  I don't think that the same claim can be made for HTML-based systems.
> 
> 
> The majority of journals I'm familiar with mandates a certain format for submission: font size, figure format, etc. So, in a HTML format submission, there should be rules as well, a standard CSS and the right elements and classes. Not different from getting a word(c) or latex template.
> 
>  
> Web conference vitally use the web in their reviewing and publishing processes.  Doesn't that show their allegiance to the web?  Would the use of HTML make a conference more webby?
> 
> As someone said, this is leading by example. 
> 
> 
> dfcp
> 
>  
> 
> 
> peter
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/03/2014 09:11 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:
> 
> 
> In my opinion, the opposite is true. PDF I almost always end up printing
> out. This isn't the point though.
> 
> Necessity is the mother of invention. In the ideal world, a web
> conference would allow only HTML submission. Failing that, at least HTML
> submission. But, currently, we cannot submit HTML at all. What is the
> point of creating a better method, if we can't use it?
> 
> The only argument that seems at all plausible to me is, well, we've
> always done it like this, and it's too much effort to change. I could
> appreciate that.
> 
> Anyway, the argument is going round in circles.
> 
> "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfpschneider@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> In my opinion PDF is currently the clear winner over HTML in both the ability
> to produce readable documents and the ability to display readable documents in
> the way that the author wants them to display.  In the past I have tried
> various means to produce good-looking HTML and I've always gone back to a
> setup that produces PDF.  If a document is available in both HTML and PDF I
> almost always choose to view it in PDF.  This is the case even though I have
> particular preferences in how I view documents.
> 
> If someone wants to change the format of conference submissions, then they are
> going to have to cater to the preferences of authors, like me, and reviewers,
> like me.  If someone wants to change the format of conference papers, then
> they are going to have to cater to the preferences of authors, like me,
> attendees, like me, and readers, like me.
> 
> I'm all for *better* methods for preparing, submitting, reviewing, and
> publishing conference (and journal) papers.  So go ahead, create one.  But
> just saying that HTML is better than PDF in some dimension, even if it were
> true, doesn't mean that HTML is better than PDF for this purpose.
> 
> So I would say that the semantic web community is saying that there are better
> formats and tools for creating, reviewing, and publishing scientific papers
> than HTML and tools that create and view HTML.  If there weren't these better
> ways then an HTML-based solution might be tenable, but why use a worse
> solution when a better one is available?
> 
> peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/03/2014 08:02 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:
> [...]
> 
> As it stands, the only statement that the semantic web community are
> making is that web formats are too poor for scientific usage.
> [...]
> 
> Phil
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>