Re: Cost and access (Was Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> writes:

> Let's work through the requirements and a plausible migration plan. We need:
>
> 1 persistent storage: it's hard to beat books for a feeling of persistence.
> Contracts with trusted archival institutions can help but we might also
> want some assurances that the protocols and formats will persist as well.

In my area, the majority of journals aren't printed; I've thrown away
conference proceedings the last decade anyway.

Protocols and formats, yes, true a problem. I think in an argument
between HTML and PDF, then it's hard to see one has the advantage over
another. My experience is that HTML is easier to extract text from,
which is always going to be base line.

For what it is worth, there are achiving solutions, including
archive.org and arxiv.org both of which leap to mind.


> 2 impact factor: i have the impression that conventional publishers have a
> bit of a monopoly and and sudden disruption would be hard to engineer. How
> do to get leading researchers to devote their work in some new crackpot
> e-journal to the exclusion of other articles which will earn them more
> points towards tenure and grants? Perhaps the answer is slowly build the
> impact factor; perhaps it's some sort of revolution in the minds of
> administrators and funders.

This is true. So, if the reason that ESWC and ISWC only accept papers in
PDF is because we need LNCS for tenure and that they will only take PDF,
it would be good to have a public statement about this.

As it stands, the only statement that the semantic web community are
making is that web formats are too poor for scientific usage.


> I work towards a network of actionable data just like the rest of you so I
> don't want to discourage this conversation; I just want to focus it.

Okay. I would like to know who made the decision that HTML is not
acceptable and why.

Phil

Received on Friday, 3 October 2014 15:03:02 UTC