linked research (16 out of 43)

Review of "Decentralized creation of academic documents using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server"

In reply to: https://www.fiduswriter.org/2017/05/24/decentralized-creation-of-academic-documents-using-a-network-attached-storage-nas-server/

This article addresses quite a specific problem: collaborative document editing without third-party servers. The reasons for not wanting to rely on Web servers, even if they're under the control of the document author, is fairly well explained and motivated.

Addressing authoring solutions to MS Word users is diving in the deep end, but a worthy goal as this reaches a lot of researchers. However, I question that the idea of installing software is too complicated for most people.. do you not think it's possible to get the installation process for FW to be as simple as for MSWord?

I realise that this article is not about FidusWriter, but rather collaborative document editing via a NAS, but it would be helpful to explain more about what FidusWriter does and how it is normally run, ie. not on a NAS, and some comparison.

The authors seem to feel strongly about data ownership, mentioning privacy potentially being violated by corporations and governments. It's not clear however that FidusWriter provides a publishing solution, only an authoring solution. That is, once an article is finished it seems that a PDF is exported and turned over to third parties anyway? Relatedly, I would love to know more about how the authors envision this fitting in with the rest of the scholarly communication process, as mentioned in the abstract, particularly peer-review. Could a similar setup be purposed to permit reviewers to control their review contents as well? I assume FidusWriter takes care of access control, citations, formulas and figures, though the article does not state that.

The article mentions that there are other web services for academic authoring, but doesn't name any. I'd be interested to know which ones the authors analysed. Is it only the ones in the footnote? In which case only Authorea and Overleaf are problematic in the ways mentioned for running on third-party servers. I don't really see evidence that the authors have performed a comprehensive search for alternatives in this space. There are certainly clientside document authoring applications which run on personal data stores, such as Laverna which can talk to RemoteStorage servers, and dokieli (which I'm pretty sure the authors have heard of) which can talk to LDP servers, not to mention 'decentralised Google Docs' type things like NextCloud and CosyCloud. It would be worth finding out how easily any of these could be extended to add collaborative editing if they don't have it already, since they have the decentralisation part covered.

Thus, perhaps it's worth comparing running FidusWriter on a NAS to running various generic personal datastores. It seems to me that FidusWriter rather ties the editing application with the storage, which prevents the user from easily switching applications. It's not clear if FW follows a standard protocol for data exchange with the server either. These aren't really the problems of the authors in this context, but it is a downside of a non-standard system even if it's open source and installed on the user's machine. Useful future work might be taking the idea of a NAS forward with other storage/server and client/application options.

That said, I would love to see a docker image prepared to easily set up FidusWriter on any server, if that doesn't already exist!

Limitations are appropriately mentioned as cost and power of NAS devices, though no specifics are given.

Finally, the authors assume a status-quo vision of academic authoring (eg. the "need" for blind peer review) and proceed from there with a decentralisation angle. More interesting would be a paragraph or two about how an approach like this is setting the stage for future advancement in the space. I like the idea of meeting in the middle; addressing immediate problems authors have with their current tooling, whilst laying some foundations for progressing in the direction opened up to us by Web technologies.

Minor comment: what is meant by "Linux boxes" (in quotes)? Are you getting at things like Raspberry Pis?

And I can't help but ask: did you collaboratively author this article using FidusWriter on a NAS? Some screenshots of doing so would add a whole new layer of credibility to your analysis :)

🏷 academic publishing authoring decentralisation fidus writer linked research reviews https://linkedresearch.org/

Sat 27th of May 2017 at 5:05pm (+02:00)

A response to "Scholarly Social Machines"

In reply to: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/users/user384/scholarly-social-machines.html

This article looks at the scholarly communication ecosystem through the lens of social machines; something I have thought about a lot but only partially articulated through my contributions to Linked Research. In particular, the hypothesis that we are struggling to improve the state of scholarly communication despite advancements in technology because we are trapped in a machine we have ceased to see is interesting. I've had many conversations with people over the last couple of years who balk at any suggestion of a radical upheaval of scholarly communication, hiding behind notions of futility of incentivising researchers to do anything other than pubish or persih, the immovability of the for-profit publishing industry. They complain about the state of things, yet are transfixed by the status quo. I think that framing this problem as a 'trap' will perhaps nudge folks into looking for a way out, and social machines is a useful concept to work with, something very demonstrably real in other domains, and this might help with finding a perspective on scholarly communication.

The article mentions the 'ecosystem' and lists some of the stages. I think it's worth noting that in Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication we characterised the different stages, roles and actors in scholarly communication in detail (there's even a diagram!). It's important because this is a hard problem, too big a space, to talk about all at once, and breaking it down into smaller chunks that nonetheless interlink (and the interlinking is critical) can help.

Dave writes that we see the same articles about how to improve being published over and over again, and this is true. I assembled a collection of some of them here. People lament that it's too hard to change, and us Linked Research-y types release software and publish our work in a Webby decentralised way (just like Dave has done, for the version of his article that I'm reading) and shove it under peoples' noses and cry that here is the proof that it's not too hard, and if only a few more people would bother we could iron out the wrinkles and make it easier and easier for everyone to participate. It's catching on, but agonisingly slowly. Most people still smile sadly, with a look of concern about the non-future of our academic careers. Dave writes of the "Catch-22" of using traditional publishing to try to solve some of the problems; and it's true. Even csarven is pushing 'papers' to academic conferences about Linked Research and related tooling in the hopes that academics will pay attention (and so he can get his PhD within this broken system). We console ourselves that at least the PDFs were generated from HTML and CSS, and a link to an open access Web version remains in the abstract even from behind Springer's paywall. Yet somehow the dual effort of publishing 'properly' and demonstrating alternatives is still not ticking the right boxes! What's up with that? So we need a new tactic, and the questions raised in this article are pragmatic and challenging, and a step in the right direction.

Question 8 is important because I often find that when we provocatively push "extreme decentralisation" via Linked Research, people push back against that as too difficult, too flakey, underdeveloped. We're arguing from this end of the spectrum because we're fighting against the very other end right now. But it is a spectrum, and better - more robust, more powerful - would be something in between. One example: the response that an individual can't possibly be counted on to keep their research online for eternity ignores the roles libraries and institutions (and indeed traditional publishers) can play in archiving and indexing work over time.

Another note to reinforce the importance of stepping outside to look in at scholarly communication: people, mostly software engineers, with whom I work on decentralised Social Web technologies look on at academia with confoundment. People claiming to be Web Scientists are putting PDFs behind paywalls? Life-saving medical research is accessible to what percentage of human beings? It seems obvious to the outside that we're really screwing things up here. Dave implies that we need to push people towards revolution over evolution, but we need to open a few more eyes before this can happen.

So how do we get people to step outside and look back in? This article doesn't address this. Arguably the people who will show up to Dave's presentation of this are already eyes-open, so perhaps together we can scheme to break the spell that the status quo holds over others.

Framing this (improving the scholarly comms ecosystem) as an interdisciplinary research problem could be emphasised more. Certainly we could solve all of the technical problems, but the social and political ones remain. I hope that we can take some inspiration from SOCIAM in tackling this in the years to come.

🏷 academic publishing edsc2017 linked research reviews social machines https://linkedresearch.org/

Sat 27th of May 2017 at 3:47pm (+02:00)

Week in review: 15 - 21 May

Flew from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo.
Hung out with Dave and J, and Mike S and family in Tokyo.
Flew to Venice (via Moscow).
Train to Trieste. Ate all of Trieste.
Reviewed an EDSC article.
Woefully failed to attend any W3C meetings.
Got Micropub and AS2 ready to be published as RECs.

🏷 linked research socialwg travel w3c week-in-review

Sun 21st of May 2017 at 9:05pm (+02:00)

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)

It's about keeping our jobs and keeping publishers in business. It's not about advancing the state of the Web. Boring.

Keeping your job is more important than your research having an impact. Okay fine, you can have that opinion. But get out of my way.

I struggle to relate to pushback against Linked Research ideas because of money/job/norms problems. I get that these are important issues for some people, but I'm so TIRED of people using this to blockade even discussing it. It's like they don't want the status quo to change; it's comfortable. They know one way to keep their job or get funding, and won't contemplate developing others. Use the goverment funding assignment as an excuse. Easy out, no point in bothering, the government will never change. Reinforce this for the next cohort of student. Keep perpetuating the problems for the next generation. This isn't what I want from academia, and I won't play.

🏷 academic publishing linked research #WOW2017 WWW2017 https://linkedresearch.org/

Tue 4th of April 2017 at 5:00pm (+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)

Thursday the 16th of March 2017 at 9:53am (+08:00)

+ https://theconversation.com/vanity-and-predatory-academic-publishers-are-corrupting-the-pursuit-of-knowledge-45490

🏷 journals linked research publish or perish publishing

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)

Saturday the 25th of February 2017 at 4:14pm (+08:00)

+ https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2017/02/15/as-goes-the-media-so-goes-scholarly-publishing/

🏷 linked research media publishing

Week in review: 13 - 19 Feb

Announced the call for our ESWC workshop Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communications #LinkedResearch
Reviewed two papers for LDOW
Juggled some AS2 stuff..
Made progress on sloph's feed paging, aka fixed a really stupid think-o that had me stumped for a week (thanks to csarven).
Hiked from George Town to Teluk Bahang.
Ate at lots of new places.
Found a treehouse in the middle of George Town occupied by two 70 year old stoners.
Made a rainbow cheesecake.

🏷 food linked research travel week in review

Sun 19th of February 2017 at 11:59pm (+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)

Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph

Thursday the 19th of January 2017 at 11:29pm (+08:00)

+ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/a-citation-is-not-a-citation-is-not-a-citation/

🏷 citation linked research

Friday the 6th of January 2017 at 10:46am (+08:00)

🔁 https://twitter.com/csarven/status/817072257814188032

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

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)

Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph

Tuesday the 8th of November 2016 at 10:01pm (+09:00)

+ Recogito annotation platform

Amy added http://recogito.pelagios.org/rhiaro to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/

🏷 annotation linked data linked research rdf recogito semantic web social web