Where is Web Science? Time to change how we publish academic articles.

[Stian Soiland-Reyes]

Here's an interesting, brave and hopefully not too controversial article by Sarven Capadisli:

http://csarven.ca/web-science-from-404-to-200 

He challenges the Web Science community in not "eating its own dog food" and still publishing in the traditional way, as two-dimensional PDF submitted through traditional publishers, hidden review process, identified with centralized DOIs and ORCIDs, with no semantic markup and no good way to cite details of the article, like an argument or a hypothesis.

The question is why after all these years we are still doing things wrong and not using the Web properly - if we can't even force ourselves to change our ways, how can we change the rest of academia?

See for instance this (I would argue fair!) criticism of the FAIR principles paper: http://csarven.ca/web-science-from-404-to-200#fair-is-not-so-fair

There are several examples of well-intentioned researchers presenting their findings and ideas on how to take scholarly communication as well as Web Science forward, yet the majority stop at actually demonstrating what they propose. To take one recent example, the article The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship with 53 authors (that is not a typo), hosted by nature.com (2016), points out a helpful guideline: F1. (meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier. To eat one’s own dogfood, we would have expected an identifier for that statement, however it does not exist. Naturally, one should ask: what is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) about that statement? What is the measurable delta between this article and every other article (and there are many) making the exact same recommendation? If we were to try to reuse the guideline that is put forward in our study, how can we link to it without any ambiguity? Here is a working example from 1996 https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#Universality2 written by Tim Berners-Lee which states: Axiom 0a: Universality 2. Any resource of significance should be given a URI. Why was not this earlier work reused or cited?

 

What can each of us do to improve current practices? 

Setting down principles is one thing, but we have to try our best to follow them as well. 

-- 

Stian Soiland-Reyes

eScience Lab, The University of Manchester

[Herbert Van de Sompel]

Thanks for this, Stian.

I would like to mention that I have invited Sarven Capadisli to talk about his work/perspectives during the Technical Session at the OAI10, the 10th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, which will be in Geneva, June 21-23 2017. 

Cheers

Herbert

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Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6126

==

[Dewaard, Anita (ELS-HBE)]

Absolutely!The first example I know of is Douglas Engelbart’s article from 1962 (way before the web) where each sentences was (and still is) addressable: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html. 

Nearer home, Tim Clark and Herbert v/d Sompel created the Open Annotation model, http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/ which allows this to be done to any article. You can’t blame the FAIR authors for this, though, it’s just common practice in all of (science, but also literary) publishing, in my view because search engines have obviated the need for direct addressing. I can find any sentence in the FAIR paper without a direct address, so why go through the trouble?

Anita

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[Clark, Timothy W.]

why after all these years we are still doing things wrong and not using the Web properly?

 I have tried over and over to explain to my cat that sofas are not scratching posts, to no avail.  :-)

Tim

On Jan 25, 2017, at 9:11 AM, Dewaard, Anita (ELS-HBE) <A.de...@elsevier.com> wrote:

Absolutely!The first example I know of is Douglas Engelbart’s article from 1962 (way before the web) where each sentences was (and still is) addressable: BLOCKEDdougengelbart[.]org/pubs/augment-3906[.]htmlBLOCKED. 

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[Sarven Capadisli]

On 2017-01-25 15:11, Dewaard, Anita (ELS-HBE) wrote:
> I can find any sentence in the FAIR
> paper without a direct address, so why go through the trouble?

I think this is at odds with FAIR's F1 and TimBL's Axioms. And arguably
the whole idea of hyperlinking altogether.

Is there a uniform language in which you can find and refer to any
sentence on the Web? Or is that just completely dependent on the tools
that you prefer to use? Or the tools that you have the ability, access
to, or have agreed to under their terms of service?

Search engines may help you find a sentence, but the whole ordeal is
predominantly led by a human. You in fact not only give the input to
look up a sentence, but filter through the results, navigate through
options before actually "finding" exactly what is suitable.

This is not at odds with structured and semantically annotated
information per se. It is still worthwhile to fetch the descriptions of
resources as well as find out any inbound information out there.

How does your favourite search engine respond to a simple inquiry like:

"Sentences that disagrees with 'foo bar' but agrees with 'baz qux'"

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

[Bruce Barkstrom]

Well, for whatever it's worth, my Linux Mint system using Firefox

couldn't figure out how to decode the smime.p7s attachment.

I tried both of the UTF type encoding schemes and neither

worked.

There are deeper issues here, but it would take longer than

I've got right now to delve into them.

Bruce R. Barkstrom

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[Sarven Capadisli]

On 2017-01-25 15:11, Dewaard, Anita (ELS-HBE) wrote:

> in my view because search engines have obviated
> the need for direct addressing. I can find any sentence in the FAIR
> paper without a direct address, so why go through the trouble?

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-523/deWaard.pdf

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