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

On 10/4/14 7:14 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> Executive summary:
> 1) Bring up an ePrints repository for “our” conferences, and a myExperiment instance, or equivalents;
> 2) Start to contribute to the Open Source community.
>
> Please, please, let’s not build anything ourselves - if we are to do anything, then let’s choose and join suitable existing activity and make it better for everyone.
>
> Longer version.
> I too have a deep sense of deja vu all over yet again:-)
>
> But I have learned something - on-one seems to collaborate with people outside the tecchy world.
> Most documents for me start as a (set of) collaborative Google Doc (unmentioned) or a Word or OpenOffice document (not mentioned much) on Dropbox.
> And the collaborators couldn’t possibly help me build a Latex document or even any interesting HTML.
>
> Anyway…
> I see quite a few different things in this discussion, and all of them deeply important for the research publishing world at the moment.
> a) Document format;
> b) Metadata about the publication, both superficial and deep;
> c) Data, systems and workflow about the research.
>
> But starting almost everything from scratch (the existing standards and a few tools) is rarely the way to go in this webby world.
>
> There is real stuff out there (as I have said more than once before), that could really benefit from the sort of activity that Bernadette describes.
> I know about a number of things, but there will be others.
>
> (a) and (b) Repositories (because that is what we are talking about)
> http://eprints.org  is an Open Source Linked Data publishing platform for publications that handles the document (in any format) and the shallow metadata, but could easily have deep as well if people generated it.
> Eghttp://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/271458
> I even have an existing endpoint with all the ePrints RDF in it -http://foreign.rkbexplorer.com, with currently 24G & 182854666 triples, so such software can be used.
>
> What would be wrong with bringing up such a repository for SemWeb/Web conferences, one for all, or for each or series?
> And require the authors to enter their data into the site - it’s not hard, and there is existing documentation of what to do.
> It is mature technology with 100s of person-years invested.
> And perhaps most importantly, it has the buy in of the library and similar communities, and has been field tested with users.
> It would certainly be more maintainable than the DogFood site - and it would be a trivialish task to move the great DogFood efforts over to it. DogFood really is something of a silo - exactly what Linked Data is meant to avoid.
> And “we” might actually contribute to the wider community by enhancing the Open Source Project with Linked Data enhancements that were useful out there!
> Or a more challenging thing would be to makehttp://www.dspace.org  do what we want (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Linked+Open+Data+for+DSpace)!
>
> (c) Workflows and Datasets
> I have mentionedhttp://www.myexperiment.org  before, but can’t remember if I have mentionedhttp://www.wf4ever-project.org
> Again, these are Linked Data platforms for publishing; in this case workflows and datasets etc.
> They are seriously mature, certainly compared with what we might build - see, for examplehttps://github.com/wf4ever/ro
> And exactly the same as the Repositories.
>
> What would be wrong with bringing up such a repository for SemWeb/Web conferences, one for all, or for each or series?
> …ditto…
> Who know, maybe the Crawl, as well as the Challenge entries might be able to usefully describe what they did using these ontologies etc.?
>
> Please, please, let’s not build anything ourselves - if we are to do anything, then let’s choose and join suitable existing activity and make it better for everyone.
>
> Hugh

+1


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Kingsley Idehen	
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