publishing (15 out of 16)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Write about your experiences.
- Write about your ideas for change.
- Write about your action for change.
- 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.
Troublemaker csarven just won't lie down and sign whatever publishers ask him to.
Full Article, Immediate, Permanent, Discoverable, and Accessible
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:
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:
Another list
There are so many different angles to approach this from, and so many things that need to change in sync. We need:
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...
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):
See you in Portoroz!
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
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
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
The Virtue of Paywalls
Gatekeepers are required in academic publishing to enforce quality, coherance and to lend authority. When anyone can publish anything, as is the case on the Web today, lies and misinformation spread much faster than the truth. People publish opinions as facts, distorted interpretations of data, make general statements based on samples and take things out of context.
Academia is better than this. We value scientific rigour. We value evidence for claims, and repeatability of experiments. Nothing is more important to us than seeking the truth, whole and unbiased. Except tenure or grant funding.
People all over the world write about their experiences, but these are anecdotal. If I want to understand a topic, I read about it in an established journal or conference proceedings. I can tell it's reliable because I have to log in from behind my institution's IP address to access it. It's great that the taxpayers generously cover the cost for me to access material that most of them can't.
Not that they want to. The general public, and even our world leaders, are skeptical of 'experts'. Despite the fact that we have devoted our lives to specialising in one topic so we can understand it to its fullest, so that others don't have to. They deried us as 'out of touch'. Meanwhile continuing to proliferate their gut feelings on social media, spreading nonsense, missing nuance.
It's a good job we can rely on our trusty paywalls to keep the real knowledge separate from all of that.
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Why is three positive conference reviews more reassuring than one thousand facebook comments?
How do I know the reviewers are experts? I don't know who they are. I know the context and background of my facebook friends, I can critically interpret their replies. The reviewers are anonymous. They're people who had some time, just barely, probably during a commute or on the toilet. Or who owed someone a favour.
I've reviewed papers, usually having been asked to by the person who was supposed to be reviewing, about topics I barely know. I think: "it's okay, the other reviewers will swing it if I'm wrong."
...
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Some questions
How do we get people to mistrust the media?
How do we get people to take context into account?
Are food bloggers the bane of professional chefs?
How do I prove I know what I'm talking about?
How do I know I know what I'm talking about?
Why would anyone care what I think?
Should I publish it anyway?
Why is three positive conference reviews more reassuring than one thousand facebook comments?
What will I do when the Web runs out?
What comes after?
Where can I hide?
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Amy shared https://pandelisperakakis.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/how-to-negotiate-with-publishers-an-example-of-immediate-self-archiving-despite-publishers-embargo-policy/
the problem of restricted access can easily be solved using existing infrastructures and with a small additional effort on behalf of the authors or their librarians - Pandelis
If you are Web savvy, it is a 'small effort' to self-archive your work in a space you control. But not everyone can manage that. And then, feedback, reviews and collaboration also in a space you control is no 'small effort'. Linking to and from specific parts of other research is not trivial when reports and results are missing fine-grained open identifiers. Maintaining your reputation and tracking the effect of your work (so that other researchers and institutions take you seriously) is no 'small effort'. Searchability and guaranteeing long-term persistence is no 'small effort'. There's still a way to go on both the infrastructure and cultural fronts here.
The (Social) Web has most of the pieces. They just need putting together.
That's what we're working towards with #LinkedResearch.
For real.
"Elsevier patents online academic peer review." - EFF
+ https://hypothes.is/blog/a-coalition-of-scholarly-annotators/
Amy added https://hypothes.is/blog/a-coalition-of-scholarly-annotators/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://etherpad.lobid.org/p/swib15-breakout-sessions
Amy added http://etherpad.lobid.org/p/swib15-breakout-sessions to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://csarven.ca/linked-research
Amy added http://csarven.ca/linked-research to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/