/publishing-utopia

A proposed GenR theme (Nov 2019)

Open Science and a Publishing Utopia — A GenR Theme

#PublishingUtopia

Focusing the theme

Publishing Utopias: A GenR Theme

We are finally reaching a threshold of change in academic publishing to move over to open digital infrastructure that actually work, and a new arena of technologies that could be called ‘open science publishing’ — the computational paper, linked open data, knowledge graphs, etc. — but that this change involves work and for groups to take the steps necessary for it to happen. The theme we will look at who is making these steps. And in addition get a sharper focus on what this future should look like and how this new technological phase can disintermediate (AKA ‘cutting out the middlemen’) the current restrictive commercial publishers' monopolies. (updated 26.2.2020)

Theme Call

What are the current development that will lead to a utopian free circulation of knowledge?

Utopia is the vision of an ideal future state of the world. A criticism of such utopia’s is that they serve as unattainable fictions, always just out of reach. But this is not the case with Open Science and publishing and for once the future is within our grasp. A future where there could be global Open Access, much wider participation in scholarship. and a techstack for open data and semantic workflows. In this theme the idea is to look at what this future publishing world would look like and how would we the benefits from a frictionless and interoperable publishing systems. The example benefits of putting humanity's knowledge to work are to improve research replication rates in research to ensure better rates of drug discovery, or to tackle climate change where OA rates are still at less than 30%. (Tai and Robinson 2018)

The building blocks for future publishing are in place — preprints, open peer review, OA mandates, etc. — and the appetite for change is there, especially from a globally expanding higher education student readership who are excluded from humanity's knowledge as borne out by Joe Karaganis’s MIT Press OA book ‘Shadow Libraries’, which looks at how huge swaths of the population are failed by our current publishing systems and are left with no other option than to take matters into their own hands.

There is an open call to contribute (Nov 2019) and you can find out more at the links below. Any questions or comments please DM @Gen_R_ or email simon@genr.eu

References

Tai, Travis C., and James P. W. Robinson. ‘Enhancing Climate Change Research With Open Science’. Frontiers in Environmental Science 6 (2018). https://doi.org/10/gf64mq.

Links

Notes: https://github.com/Gen-R/publishing-utopia

Twitter list: https://twitter.com/Gen_R_/lists/publishing-utopia

Sources: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1838445/generation_r/items/collectionKey/VW34GSEA

Idea to include in the theme

Projects

Inspired / Hired / Wired / Tired / Expired

Inspired

  • Self publishing and decentralised publishing
  • Solid, Dockieli, etc
  • Using flat file systems
  • OA and considering the public as an academic reader
  • free-to-publish, free-to-read
  • Semantic Open Access
  • Bootstrap for multi-format typesetting - Typesetting and designing for multi-format - Vivliostyle and Paginated CSS
  • Business models and funder requirements, disintermediation, creative destruction/disruption
  • Public infrastructure: projects and economics
  • Slowly introducing the Blockchain
  • Crypto IDs and publishing
  • Data mining - collation, enrichment, searching

Hired

Wired

  • Open Science Publishing (where science can be interchanged for: research, scholarly, etc.)
  • Substance
  • Collaborative and real-time systems (invoving complete research cycle 'Open Science Publishing')
  • Methods of systems dev: DevOps and Virtualisation, TTD, CI, CD, IasC
  • JATS interoperable format

Tired

Expired

  • Books in browsers - what happend to the BiB?
  • Socialbook

Free-to-publish, free-to-read

Surveys

  • MIT: Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms - https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mind-the-gap
  • Computational papers:Konkol, Markus, Daniel Nüst, and Laura Goulier. ‘Publishing Computational Research -- A Review of Infrastructures for Reproducible and Transparent Scholarly Communication’. ArXiv:2001.00484 [Cs], 2 January 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00484.

Open research/Open scholarship/Open science publishing?

Open Science Publishing means to make a publication that is linked to the whole research cycle, with all digital objects and related code tooling open. For a publication to be fully Open Access, licenced for the four open freedoms - to use, study, share and improve - and be 'copy left' licenced so all derivative work is also open. To be technically interoperable using open standards, semantically encoded and use controlled vovabularies, taxonomies and PIDs, and have all its sub components as discrete digital objects. Where needed to support 'computational papers' technologies. To use versioning, continous integration for real-time validation of open standards, etc., with open source code to allow for multi-format replication with software citation. To support fair metrics, granular annotation, social book/reading features, but prevent reader intrusive tracking, and support deep linking. Lastly to support detailed attribution and roles and not to prohibit publishing or reading with unecessary charges, moving fees away from these two points in the publcation lifecycle.

Mapping the questions in Open Science Publishing and locating FOSS/open providers

Technical (more so)

  • Open Peer Review
  • Preprints
  • Computational papers
  • Publication PID
  • Person PID
  • Organisation PID

Social (more so)

  • Company open data - https://opencorporates.com/
  • CoC
  • Open IPR licencing
  • Copy left - derivative works have to be open licenced
  • Four freedoms: use, study, share and improve