Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications meet the Web
Changing the way scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, evaluated, and consumed
Brief description
The world of scientific publications has been largely oblivious to the advent of the Web and to advances in ICT. Even more surprisingly, this is the case even for research in the ICT area: ICT researchers have been able to exploit the Web to improve the (production) process in almost all areas, but not their own. We are producing scientific knowledge (and publications in particular) essentially following the very same approach we followed before the Web. Scientific knowledge dissemination is still based on the traditional notion of “paper” publication and on peer review as quality assessment method. The current approach encourages authors to write many (possibly incremental) papers to get more “tokens of credit”, generating often unnecessary dissemination overhead for themselves and for the community of reviewers. Furthermore, it does not encourage or support reuse and evolution of publications: whenever a (possibly small) progress is made on a certain subject, a new paper is written, reviewed, and published, often after several months. The situation is analogous if not worse for textbooks.
The LiquidPub project proposes a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated and maintained. This shift is enabled by the notion of Liquid Publications, which are evolutionary, collaborative, and composable scientific contributions. Many Liquid Publication concepts are based on a parallel between scientific knowledge artifacts and software artifacts, and hence on lessons learned in (agile, collaborative, open source) software development, as well as on lessons learned from Web 2.0 in terms of collaborative evaluation of knowledge artifacts.
This project is inspired by the broader and evolving vision (yes, the vision is liquid too) that is available at liquidpub.org - and that’s why the short description in this page is similar to the one on liquidpub.org.
Targets
The immediate targets are the scientific research communities and the world around them, including publishers that, in a liquid world, will need to develop novel services and business models. In the medium term the results of this project will become applicable also to forms of knowledge different from scientific knowledge, including corporate knowledge, the scholarly knowledge taught in schools (extending the trend that we are witnessing, for instance, with Wikipedia), and the preparation, evaluation and execution of EU projects like this one, with reduction of evaluation time and cost, improvement of the evaluation quality, and optimization of the proposal preparation effort.
Status
Results and additional reading material (case studies, surveys, and the like) will be made available from this web site. The project also is creating an open source development effort and a platform to manage liquid publications and their evaluation.
Some ideas that inspired the work in this project are available here: LiquidPub paper-latest.pdf
Partners
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Coordinator. Competences in knowledge management and assessment, software engineering, Web technologies. |
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One of the leading company in publishing scientific papers and books. |
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Competences in social networks, trust and reputation. |
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Philosophers with competences in epistemology of IT. |
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Competences in modeling and analyzing competing behaviors of scientists. |
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:18 pm
What you describe sounds very like what during the last decade mathematicians are doing through arxiv.org. The reason why other scientific communities so far don’t follow this excellent example seems me social and political. I mean ways in which academic communities organise themselves around the globe. Think of philosophical communities
June 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
One of the observation is that publications play a big role in the academic career, in terms of judging the quality of the researcher as well as his impact. This is one of the few items that can be ‘counted’ in the sense that more publications are better. An interesting question would be how the publication behavior changes if publications were not that an important at all any more for advancing the academic career (but e.g., results or impact instead).
Another observation is that the reviewers’ behavior changes. I see more and more students doing the reviews instead of the PC members themselves, and that without supervision in the sense that the reviews coming out of this are sometimes very indifferent.
Finally, basic principles of publications (like missing related work) are for some reviewers not enough reason for a straight reject any more. In general, the bar is lowering, inviting more and more submissions.
I think a project like this is important to have and to continue, but the problem is bigger than just the publication process itself.
BTW, there were no updates on this since last year, what’s going on?
June 11th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
The project has officially started on May 1st. We have started the activities. A couple of more people are joining the project.
You will start seeing signs of life in late June