Invited Talk: Patrick Hochstenbach (Ghent University) — Decentralized Scholarly Communication and Web Agents

Dear all,

Decentralized scholarly communication is a topic that stirred up a lot of interest in our regular meetings -- so we invited Patrick to tell us more about current developments and where things are going.

The talk is scheduled during the next regular meeting on Thursday (March 14) from 9 AM CET. Please find below the talk details -- and feel free to forward the invitation to any of your colleagues who might be interested in the topic.

The complete meeting details (joining instructions, etc.) are included in the calendar entry for Thursday's meeting:
https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/fa57cd31-2ad6-4a89-851c-255a22b37c7b/20240314T090000/

To subscribe to all CG meetings, you can import the CG's calendar in your regular calendar service with this link: https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/webagents/calendar/export/

See you on Thursday,
Andrei


Title: Decentralized Scholarly Communication and Web Agents

Speaker: Patrick Hochstenbach

Bio: Patrick worked for 25 years for academic libraries at Ghent University Library (Belgium), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), and Lund University Library (Sweden). He is doing his PhD in computer science on scholarly communication using the decentralized web.

Abstract: Scholarly communication has seen in the last 30 years a massive monopolization in the hands of a few academic publishers that control over 50% of the publishing market and, in some fields, more than 70%. The five biggest publishers have yearly double-digit profit margins that are higher than those of any other industry. The source of these profit margins is, for the most part, freely available. Governments and industry fund the academic community to produce academic papers. These papers find their way to high-ranking peer-reviewed journals for academics to advance their careers. These peer reviews are provided for free by the academic community. Once published, the same community buys the papers in their published form to get informed about their own research. For more than 20 years, the open-access movement has used a global network of subject and institutional repositories to provide free versions of academic papers. Interoperability affordances allow the papers in these repositories to be discoverable, and overlay services such as indexing are provided. However, the potential of a vast global network is not used optimally to provide a genuine alternative scholarly communication system that should encompass registration, certification, endorsement, and archiving services. These services are currently decentralized and decoupled from traditional journal platforms. To make such networks interoperable, not only new affordances are required but also some level of orchestration or choreography is required to drive the scholarly communication process and create a transparent, trustworthy scholarly record. Web agents are envisioned in our decentralized scholarly communication projects to help ensure that all functions of scholarly communication are fulfilled in an appropriate manner.

Received on Saturday, 9 March 2024 07:18:56 UTC