Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications meet the Web

Project 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.

Support

	The LIQUIDPUB project acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET-Open grant number: 213360.

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.