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

As is often the case on the Internet, this discussion gives me a terrible sense of dejá vu. We've had this discussion many times before.
Some years back the IW3C2 (the steering committee for the WWW conference series, of which I am part) first tried to require HTML for the WWW conference paper submissions, then was forced to make it optional because authors simply refused to write in HTML, and eventually dropped it because NO ONE (ok, very very few hardy souls) actually sent in HTML submissions.
Our conclusion at the time was that the tools simply were not there, and it was too much of a PITA for people to produce HTML instead of using the text editors they are used to. Things don't seem to have changed much since.
And this is simply looking at formatting the pages, never mind the whole issue of actually producing hypertext (ie., turning the article's text into linked hypertext), beyond the easily automated ones (e.g., links to authors, references to papers, etc..). Producing good hypertext, and consuming it, is much harder than writing plain text. And most authors are not trained in producing this kind of content. Making this actually "semantic" in some sense is still, in my view, a research topic, not a routine reality.
Until we have robust tools that make it as easy for authors to write papers with the advantages afforded by PDF, without its shortcomings, I do not see this changing.
I would love to see experiments (e.g., certain workshops) to try it out before making this a requirement for whole conferences.
Bernadette's suggestions are a good step in this direction, although I suspect it is going to be harder than it looks (again, I'd love to be proven wrong ;-)).
Just my personal 2c
Daniel


On Oct 3, 2014, at 12:50  - 03/10/14, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> 

Daniel Schwabe                      Dept. de Informatica, PUC-Rio
Tel:+55-21-3527 1500 r. 4356        R. M. de S. Vicente, 225
Fax: +55-21-3527 1530               Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22453-900, Brasil
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~dschwabe

Received on Saturday, 4 October 2014 02:15:56 UTC