TheWebConf 2018 in Lyon

Despite the fact I am no longer officially an academic, I hauled myself off-route from my EU wanderings to France to attend my fifth World Wide Web Conference. This conference series holds a little nostalgia for me, because it's the very first place I published a paper (in Seoul in 2014) and somewhere I met for the first time many academic idols and people who have gone on to become great friends, collaborators, and shape my future in ways that are even now still unfolding.

Not being institutionally supported though, there was no way I could justify the registration fees out of my own pocket. Fortunately I got two free days for chairing the Developer's track, and one free day courtesy of csarven for helping out with his workshop.

On the Monday I stayed home and worked until it was time to join the LDOW dinner. On Tuesday I sat in on the Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication workshop, and by 'sat in' I mean took detailed transcription of everything everyone said. It went well. In the evening I somehow managed to convene a dinner attended by (hashtag namedropping) TimBL, Henry Thompson, Jeni Tennison, Sarven, Sandro, Jenny and An from CredCo. Wendy Hall and Ruben Verborgh had planned to attend too but missed out due to VIP activities and going to the wrong restaurant respectively.

On Wednesday I tried to pay attention to the Journalism and Misinformation track. I also joined the Minute Madness to present a one minute plug for data.occrp.org.

Thursday was the Developer's track, the official reason I was there. I took turns chairing with Thomas Steiner, and all of the presentations went really well - including all live demos and a remote speaker!

Thursday evening's alternative to the Gala dinner was fancy delicious vegan food at Like An Elephant. I got lost, fell off my bike, and had to climb a hill to get there, but it was totally worth it.

I spent Friday morning in the Web History track and the afternoon in W3C. Web History was fascinating of course, with Tim, Wendy and others reminiscing (and disagreeing) about early events that shaped the Web. In the W3C track, Sandro presented on the Social Web WG (that old thing) and how that leads into the next big thing - Credibility on the Web.

🏷 http://hawke.org/sandro/ Sarven Capadisli TheWebConf academia conference https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Sat 28th of April 2018 at 8:00pm (+02:00)

Literally every time I register for an academic conference I have to email the organisers to request that the 'title' field of the registration form doesn't force women to declare their marital status, or non-binary people to pick a gender.

Like jeeebus just make it an optional field if you have to include it at all.

🏷 conferences feminism equality life diversity academia

Tue 20th of February 2018 at 9:59pm (+00:00)

Week in review: 12 - 18 Feb

Spent the week in the countryside with my wee bird and my Mum's angsty cat and no transport links.
Worked from couch.
Reviewed a paper for the Linked Data on the Web workshop (WebConf2018) and meta-reviewed for the Developer Track.
Shaved my head.
Surprise visit to friends in Lincoln.

🏷 week in review travel uk academia thewebconf2018

Sun 18th of February 2018 at 10:37pm (+00:00)

I'm doing my thesis corrections.

As you may know, my whole thesis writing process has been public on Github throughout, in the interests of #OpenScience and #LinkedResearch. The feedback from my examiners during my viva is documented as issues with the 'viva' tag, and I also opened more issues from my own notes during the defense.

If there are bits of my thesis you've read on the past or are particularly interested in, now would be a great time to file any other issues you've spotted for things you'd like to see updated or fixed in the final hardbound copy of my thesis which will, I presume, live in the University of Edinburgh library, survive the impending technological apocalypse, and generally outlive all of us. I aim to print the thing by the 31st of October.

🏷 https://linkedresearch.org/ academic publishing linked research open science thesis phd phdchat academia

Sun 17th of September 2017 at 11:42am (+02:00)

Week in review: 17 - 23 July

Spent the week in Southampton and one day in Oxford talking about decentralisation, scholarly communication, LinkedResearch, personal data stores and the like with cool people like emax, csarven, bblfish, TimBL, Wendy, Nigel, Ramine, Jun, DDR..
Imagined eprints as a tiny LDN-powered JS app (ldprints).
Net magazine issue 296 came out in print.. With an article about Linked Data Notifications!
Missed a bunch of buses.
Spent a couple of hours eating great food at the Southbank Center food market, just like summer 2014 weekends. Remembered why I love and hate London.
Surprise visited my Mum. Now I can tweet again.

🏷 academia academic publishing decentralisation ldn linked research social machines sociam travel week in review workshop

Sun 23rd of July 2017 at 10:35am (+01:00)

Review of Instrumenting Continuous Knowledge Extraction, Sharing, and Benchmarking

In reply to: https://marco-brambilla.com/2017/05/11/instrumenting-continuous-knowledge-extraction-sharing-and-benchmarking/

I like how this article seeks to accommodate a broad view of viable data sources for research, and particularly encourages data sharing and reuse between researchers.

The authors provide three examples of existing tools which could do (or be adapted to do) parts of the suggested pipeline. I hope that publishing this encourages others who are developing tools along these lines to come forward and let the authors and others know so that the community can start a comprehensive directory, as I'm sure there are plenty more.

It would be helpful to also have a characterisation of what is definitely missing as far as the authors know, and what the authors think are good directions to priortise for near term research and development.

Obviously I agree with the authors' call to open source such tooling for community benefit. I'd be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on the "agreed-upon integration platform" and what you think the best forum for discussing such a platform would be. Hopefully we can come up with ideas for that during the EDSC workshop discussion sessions!

🏷 academia academic publishing edsc2017 linked research review semantic web https://linkedresearch.org/

Fri 19th of May 2017 at 1:01pm (+02:00)

TFW you really want to see the reviews for an academic paper but academia sucks.

🏷 academia linked research open science peer review phdchat https://linkedresearch.org/

Sun 23rd of April 2017 at 1:11pm (+08:00)

Pioneering the Linked Open Research cloud

This year, the Linked Data on the Web workshop at WWW2017 held an open discussion session about academic publishing. In particular, about what is getting in the way of us getting more research outputs into the LOD Cloud. The discussion was led by Sarven Capadisli, the loudest voice behind the Linked Research initiative, who did his best to remain a neutral facilitator, and let others in the room argue about the things he is normally arguing about.

There was a general consensus that we should have research from the Linked Data on the Web community in the form of Linked Data, and on the Web. Sounds like kind of a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised. Or maybe you wouldn't. The group, around 30 people, discussed the reasons why we, as a community, are lagging.

One of the reasons is tooling. Nobody wants to hand-author HTML, especially not with RDFa in. Nobody really wants to turn their research articles into datasets in any other syntax either. There are (apparently) still a large portion of researchers even in CS who use MSWord to generate their final PDFs so they need something that works at least as well as that to generate Web-friendly submissions.

There is also a matter of incentives, on several different fronts. Most researchers are a-researchin' and publishing their work to advance their career, and to get funding so they can do new cool stuff. So how are individual researchers incentivised to put in the extra effort it takes to generate HTML? On another level, how do we incentivise researchers to improve the state of tooling and resources? The first can be tackled along multiple fronts, one of which is petitioning publishers to demand HTML (just like today they demand LaTeX). What are the incentives for publishers to do this? There were a few ideas thrown around, including how they can improve their SEO, access, discoverability, and creating more pleasurable reading experiences than PDFs can deliver.

But there's a large faction ill-at-ease with depending so much on publishers to drive this change, even if it didn't look like it would be an agonisingly slow process. Some of us, myself included, would like to shift the whole scholarly communications process to be more self-sufficient and less dependant on centralised third parties. We do not want to do this at the expense of quality of work of course! (Which some people immediately assume is the case). Beyond publishing, we want to open up the review process, so it's both more transparent, and so researchers get the credit they deserve for this work. Conversations can continue well beyond the submission process if the reviews are open and public. But again, we need to work on the tooling and incentives to enable this.

Whilst I agree that we are woefully underdeveloped on the tooling front, I object to the weight this was given in the context of getting just Linked Data researchers to adapt to the Web. Personally I think if Linked Data researchers are going to cry about being required to submit their contributions as Linked Data, I will have trouble taking them seriously. Writing HTML is not a high bar. If you're comfortable with LaTeX, you can switch off a few neurons and write HTML instead. Or you can use Pandoc. As Jens Lehmann succinctly put it, the LDOW workshop is about advancing the state of Linked Data on the Web. If this community is not prepared to drive the state of this forward, even (especially?) if it includes working outside of the current system and taking some risks, who is going to?

So overall there was a vague feeling of consensus that we need to do something to take better advantage of Web technologies, and that LDOW as an established and respected venue is a good grounds for an experiment. I don't know if LDOW will manage to require HTML submissions next year, but the organising committee seem like they'll be inclined to strongly incentivise it. Stay tuned (watch the public-lod@w3.org mailing list. And speak up, if you care. Notes from the session are here.

We'll be continuing this discussion in the Web Observatories workshop this afternoon, around 4pm.

PS. the Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication workshop at ESWC this year requires Web-based submissions and is all about building and connecting the tooling to advance the state of academic publishing on the Web. Deadline is 17th of April. See you there.

🏷 academia academic publishing csarven ldow2017 linked data linked research Open Access WWW2017

Tue 4th of April 2017 at 9:51am (+08:00)

Troublemaker csarven just won't lie down and sign whatever publishers ask him to.

Full Article, Immediate, Permanent, Discoverable, and Accessible

🏷 Sarven Capadisli academia csarven linked research Open Access publishing https://linkedresearch.org/

Tue 14th of March 2017 at 9:19pm (+08:00)

Week in review: 27 Feb - 5 Mar

Spent a day in Ipoh.
Took the bus from Ipoh to KL, spent most of the night in KL Airport, then flew to Bali.
Settled into a small dorm in a nice hostel in Canggu, Bali. Got bedbugs.
Finished and submitted AoIR extended abstract called #ownYourData in networked publics. Found some cracking new literature to read in the process.
Did yoga once a day, except on Wednesday, when I did it twice.
Went to a 90 minute gong meditation class. Fell asleep a bit.
Ate loads of good but slightly more expensive than anticipated, and almost entirely non-local, food.
Spent 3/4 day in Ubud.
Opened my thesis in my text editor.

🏷 academia Bali, Indonesia meditation travel yoga

Sun 5th of March 2017 at 9:00pm (+08:00)

Effecting change in academic publishing

Academic publishing is a hostage of a commercial industry. You've no doubt read a few million and a half thinkpieces and committments about how:

academics' free labour is exploited by publishing houses for profit;
universities, libraries, and other similar institutions are funnelling millions in taxpayers' money to private publishing houses in order to access knowledge their own employees or peers produced;
the peer review process is BS (and, and, and, and, and, and, and) and the social web is doing a grand job;
academia is elitist and knowledge is inaccessible;
metrics for measuring scientific impact and quality are BS;
reusing data or building on other peoples' work and ideas is hard with the existing tooling;
physical-paper-based methods of knowledge dissemination (like PDF) and the tools to produce them are missing out on the potential of modern technology (particularly the Web);
given low to zero cost of publishing thanks to the Web, it is even more ridiculous that access to these resources costs so much;
... I could go on.

People have been writing about this stuff for literally decades. The Open Access movement isn't much younger than the Web itself. And yet.

Don't worry, people aren't only writing about it. People are building things too. Things like:

Tools for creating and editing academic-style documents and data on the Web, so you're less constrained by paper-based formats.
Repositories for publishing 'papers' (research reports, articles).
Systems for web-comment-style peer-review, feedback, and commentary.
Open access, web-based journals (aggregations of selected articles, as approved by a knowledgeable committee).
Mandates to publish research and data openly.
Archives of publications or data, despite the terms of service of other publishers or copyright holders.
Ontologies for describing scientific contributions and the connections between them.
Open standards for social-like interactions in general.
Systems providing researchers with unique identifiers and profiles.
Alternative metrics and other informal engagement initiatives.

Another list

There are so many different angles to approach this from, and so many things that need to change in sync. We need:

to make research outputs digestable and learnable;
to connect ideas and people;
to chain things together - provenance, derivation, inspiration;
to connect people and make collaboration easy;
for people to not be afraid to publish work in progress, or share half-baked ideas;
ways to ascertain quality of scientific output - repeatability, verifiability, and qualifications of the researcher - to know if something is good;
to acknowledge people for their labour, particularly peer-review; to encourage quality reviews and ongoing conversations;
to give researchers control over their work;
to make research discoverable;
to aggregate relevant progjects and publications;
to congregate communities for discussion and development;
to preserve work for the future.

A puzzle that needs piecing together

There are many pieces to the puzzle. There are many people working on these pieces, or components which could be part of a piece. Maybe not even in the context of improving academic publishing.

Are you one of them? If you count yourself amongst the academic community and you're frustrated by the state of publishing - or working to change it - or just working on something that could be applied to improve it - there are some things you can do right now to help roll this ball...

Write about your experiences.
Write about your ideas for change.
Write about your action for change.

Then: show up in Portoroz, Slovenia, at the end of May and talk about it with other people who care.

The big picture is big

The big picture is big. We need lots of people with broad and niche expertise to address this properly. No one research group, project, or even discipline (and certainly not individual person) is going to be able to shift this alone.

The first workshop for enabling decentralised scholarly communication, is co-located with the 2017 Extended Semantic Web Conference (but by no means limited to SemWeb people, or even computer scientists).

We're eschewing the formal conference proceedings and encouraging you all to publish contributions online, at a domain of your choice (but ideally one you trust or control). Specifically, write about (any or all of):

Why you don't publish all of your work on the Web, open access, today (a few paragraphs, like a blog post).
What you're working on that might plug into a future ecosystem for academic publishing (even if you're not finished or not sure how it fits yet - that's what we'll discuss in person).
Challenges (or solutions!) specific to your discipline or field regarding open access or online publishing of research and results.

See you in Portoroz!

🏷 academia https://rhiaro.co.uk/tags/eswc2017 linked research publishing science https://linkedresearch.org/

Tue 14th of February 2017 at 12:33am (+08:00)

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Cool, social sciences are SO far ahead of web science when it comes to publishing on the Web >.> (and activism about Open Access in general) #LinkedResearch

🏷 https://linkedresearch.org/ academia linked research publishing social science webscience

Fri 30th of December 2016 at 2:41pm (+08:00)

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Week in review: 19 - 25 December

Fixed my extension activities in sloph to match the new AS2 recommendations about name and summary.
Started improving my LDN endpoint so notifications actually go into my triplestore with everything else, into a different graph for moderation.
Helped prepare stuff for the upcoming WOW workshop and our ESWC Decentralised scholarly comms workshop
Saw Rogue One.
Climbed Penang Hill; held a scorpion.
Visited Gurney Drive and Air Itam, briefly.
Successfully avoided christmas.

🏷 academia as2 ldn life Penang sloph socialwg travel

Sun 25th of December 2016 at 11:59pm (+08:00)

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Nothing like spending a day making a perfectly good article less informative and harder to read to meet some arbitrary paper-based page limit.

🏷 academia writing

Thu 15th of December 2016 at 6:10pm (+08:00)

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*Changes laptop timezone to Hawaii*

ESWC2017 deadline here we cooommmeeee...

🏷 https://rhiaro.co.uk/tags/eswc2017 academia writing

Wed 14th of December 2016 at 3:36pm (-10:00)

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