Re: [CFP] Call for Papers ESWC 2019

To whom it may concern,

Some will certainly view the following as unwarranted criticism, but I
would argue that it is about continuous improvement and raising
awareness based on societal and technical expectations. All feedback is
integral. Treat the following as you see fit. I come in peace (mostly).

On 2018-09-08 15:09, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz wrote:
> *ESWC will not accept papers that, at the time of submission, are under
> review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication
> in a journal, another conference, or another ESWC track.* The conference
> organizers may share information on submissions with other venues to
> ensure that this rule is not violated.

Please indicate:

* the entities it may, planning to, or has shared data with, as well as
a notification at the time of sharing.

* the data that's shared and under which conditions.

> The proceedings of this conference will be published in Springer’s
> Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. 

That's too bad for the community given that researchers are given two
options to have their work be part of the scholarly record:

* authors are required to sign away exclusive rights to Springer, and
articles become closed access / paywalled in that only subscribing
entities or pay-per-view can get to the content.

* authors can take the Open Access option with Article Processing
Charges (APC).. about 38 EUR / page + taxes last time I checked. The
work is in theory readable by anyone. Keep in mind that Springer doesn't
particularly want such documents to be indexed eg. some archive services
respect the robots.txt.

In either of those cases, only the privileged researchers are able to
access the content or are able to publish in an "open" way.

Granted, online publishing is not free. Naturally there are costs to put
something out there and have it stick around long time. Aside: if you
don't have a personal domain and hosting, stop reading this email and
take care of that now.

Springer doesn't promise that a representation of a scholarly record
will not change either. I've seen it changed and have documented. I've
also made aware of cases where Springer's manuscript editors have made
decisions without the authors' consent eg. changing affiliation,
changing article's content. Changes even happen after the publication
and that's a major no-no as far as what's expected of a scholarly
record. Springer has broken this legal or social "promise" - I would
argue that they are unfit for scholarly publishing on that point alone.
Beware with the OA option in that, authors are supposed to hold on to
the copyright of their work, but at least in one case (of mine) they've
somehow managed to assign the copyright to themselves. It took them a
week to correct the issue on their website. Yes, they literally had one
job. One job.

> - Papers must not exceed 15 pages (including references). Papers that
> exceed the page limit will be rejected without review.

Yikes!

Note to junior researchers: I haven't seen this strongly enforced. It is
a ballpark length - for whatever it is worth, ie. mostly to have some
(arbitrary) uniformity for articles and peer-review process. The SW
venues tend to be flexible about the length (read: look the other way
for the time being, even if it is a few pages over, and slap your hand
gently until camera-ready). If I remember correctly, Springer doesn't
particularly care if ends up being a bit over either but they might
whine about it or ask you to shorten (or cough up cash?)

I've seen abstracts break the "official" LNCS requirements ("at least 70
and at most 150 words"), and still they are not rejected without review.
When it was brought up to PC Chairs, I was told along the lines of
"C'mon Sarven...". That wasn't at all about punishing authors, but to
test if they actually meant and respected the social agreement they've
put forward.

So, I'd suggest to treat that as a general guideline. In the event a
venue rejects your work because your research article leaked into page
16 or abstract doesn't fit a particular dimension, or some other obscure
reason, that is a good time as any to look into non-print-centric venues
to communicate your work on Semantic "Web" using *Web-centric* methods.
Tell the venue to get real in the meantime.

> - All research submissions must be in English.

Ack that's kind of a de facto standard, and there are (dis)advantages
associated to that. We don't have to dwell on that. Just out of
curiosity, have you checked with reviewers skills and interest?

> - Submissions must be either in PDF or in HTML, formatted in the style
> of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer
> Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author
> Instructions
> <https://www.springer.com/us/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines> 
> For HTML submission guidance, see the HTML submission guide
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nvM3yOQkQrSXiotSeMHEIjP42Xitlp6X_a0cQeFJthc/edit?usp=sharing>.
> - We encourage embedding metadata in the PDF/HTML to provide a machine
> readable link from the paper to the resource.

There are a number of issued here that are intertwined. I'll try to
unpack for those unfamiliar:

I remain excited that ESWC (as well as ISWC) is keeping the Web-centric
path open and raising its awareness for a few years now, and can only
encourage everyone and help wherever possible to push it even further.
We got this.

Please note some clarifications on the current guidelines (hopefully
they'll be updated on the website soon):

* the Linked Open Research Cloud ( https://linkedresearch.org/cloud ) is
for everyone. It doesn't require a particular application to interact
with. Just follow the basic process to send a notification about your
article or review.

The next point is perhaps on a personal note:

* if you self-publish/archive your work (eg. at your personal website,
institution, archive) prior to legally engaging with Springer, their
self-archiving policy doesn't apply. Publish your work at you see fit
(eg formatting, location, license) and then send a version that fulfils
ESWC's requirements. If you go through the ESWC/Springer process,
naturally need to meet their requirements. However, that original
version that you self-published/archived, that's yours. No one can touch
that or demand any changes. Check with your legal know-how team if
you're in doubt or would like to learn more.

As for camera-ready, that's still Springer's print-centric workflow
unfortunately. But it really doesn't matter given the big picture. Your
HTML version was never intended for them to begin with. It was always a
gateway to something much more important.

One fundamental reason for the HTML push over the years wasn't because
of the format itself but what it entails. Which brings me to:

Researchers and labs in the SW community increasingly improve their
practice to adopt Web-centric methods to communicate their knowledge
with the rest of the world. There are different affordances as to what
and how a researcher can potentially communicate in contrast to what a
third-party company offers. A third-party will always pose as a barrier,
a limit to freedom of expression, whether it is in the form of article's
accessibility, views or interactions; as well as constraints on
exercising one's autonomy or ownership of their contributions eg. where
they can publish their knowledge, who can access it and under what
conditions, have it be part of the global scholarly record and so on.

Please note that "Self-publishing" doesn't necessarily mean that such
work automatically meets a certain quality-check and gets certified by
the community. Registration (ie existence of something) and
certification are orthogonal functions. We certainly want both without
having to compromise on the location or ownership of the content.

Keep in mind that the SW community does reviewing for free. The
publisher doesn't pay anyone obviously. Why would they when we are
willing to hand everything over on a silver platter?

Ask the ESWC/ISWC.. organisers or the steering committee as to what the
agreements are with Springer, what the budgets are.. why the conference
registrations are so high.

Ask your librarian or institution how much they pay for the
subscriptions. I'll save you some time: you're not going to get a
complete and accurate answer. The scholarly community pays one way or
another.

Ask your colleagues whether it would be possible to continue with your
research communication without paying a third-party publisher. In most
cases, you can drop them. This sort of a thing is already a nation-wide
thing in Germany and Sweden re Elsevier. More countries are leaning
towards this.

There was (maybe still is) possibility that if your article is
peer-reviewed and accepted, it could be presented as an "invited talk"
without it being in the proceedings. Now I understand that this is not
something researchers may opt for if possible, but something to consider
and maybe kindly ask the ESWC for the possibility.

Ultimately what some of us want:

* ESWC community stops their business with Springer (or any for-profit
third-party "publishing" service provider)

* ESWC (as well as ISWC, The Web Conf, Semantic Journal... with their
respective "publishers") self-operates ie. everything as usual re
peer-reviews and certification, but looks into enabling
self-publishing/archiving, alongside investing towards dedicated
archiving (or even through on-demand services). CEUR-WS.org is one of
many possibilities that can address the community's needs.

> - Authors of accepted papers will be required to provide semantic
> annotations for the abstract of their submission, which will be made
> available on the conference web site. Details will be provided at the
> time of acceptance.

Include the URL of your self-published/archived ("preprint") in your
abstract so that a free/open copy can be easily discovered for those
coming across the publisher's versions. Examples:

* Paywalled: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25639-9_5
* Open Access:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60131-1_33

I regret both publications for different reasons, but perhaps the OA
publication (with APC) even more so because we had to pay extra on top
of what our institutions were paying for the subscription. Acknowledged
that every case differs, but something for everyone to keep in mind.
What are the consequences when you go through a third-party?

> - Accepted papers will be distributed to conference attendees and also
> published by Springer in the printed conference proceedings, as part of
> the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

If/when Springer makes the publications available on their website for a
brief period of time before going closed access, use archive services
(archive.is, perma.cc, ..) to make a snapshot. Internet Archive is
polite about a server's robots.txt, so unfortunately it doesn't get
through but I think there are other ways any way - I'm sure you can
figure that out ;)

> - At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the
> conference and present the paper there.

Some can't legally or physically participate. Please indicate if

> Open and Transparent Review Policy

All great! I'm really glad to see this continue.


We want research contributions to be:

* registered: a persistent URI leading to a free and open accessible
location of the full content

* certified: peer-reviewed and other forms of quality-control and
confirmations from the community

* archived: at trusted locations

.. and naturally findable/discoverable, accessible, shareable and so on.

Along with that, we want to take the opportunity to practice the things
that the SW research community came up with - that's part of the HTML
being the "gateway" format, but it is actually about democratising
scholarly information as Linked Data, decentralisation, and building and
using interoperable applications to do cool stuff with it. Go on and use
the fancy tech in your research contributions, whether it is an article,
review, data, or anything for that matter.

None of that requires a third-party "publisher" whatsoever. If anything,
their archaic business-driven practices holds progress and considered to
be ethically unjustified. This is not strictly a SW research community
issue but systematic across the scholarly knowledge industry.


So.. good luck. Ack the fine-print and consequences of own actions.
Enjoy the conference. Control Yourself!

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i