Solid documents from the LiquidPub Project

LiquidPub members can find here information about how to acknowledge support of LiquidPub.

Foundational Publications

Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications meet the Web

Our Manifesto: Changing the way scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, evaluated, and consumed. (On this site).

Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications meet the Web (paper PDF version)

The world of scientific publications has been largely oblivious to the advent of the Web and to advances in ICT. 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.

We propose 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 in this document are based on a parallel between scientific knowledge artifacts and software artifacts, and hence on lessons learned in (agile, collaborative, open source) software development. Liquid Publications concepts are reified by a model based on i) Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKOs), which are the digital instantiation of liquid publications, by ii) the processes involved in their creation, evolution, and quality assessment, and by iii) the people and roles that contribute to knowledge creation (authors, reviewers, bloggers..). Various models (including social reputation models) are developed to analyze and improve publication quality assessment and the process for attributing credit to and measuring reputation for individuals.

Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money  Fabio Casati, Fausto Giunchiglia, Maurizio Marchese.

Published in ACM Ubiquity 8(3), Feb 2007.

LP Deliverables

D1.1. State of the Art UNITN, IIIA-CSIC, CNRS, UNIFR, SPRINGER.

This report presents an overview of the State of the Art in topics related to the on-going research in the Liquid Publications Project. The Liquid Publications Project (LiquidPub) aims to bring fundamental changes to the processes by which scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated and maintained. In order to accomplish this, many processes and areas will have to be modified. We group the areas involved in this change into four areas: creation and evolution of scientific knowledge, evaluation processes (primarily, peer-review processes and their evaluation), computational trust and reputation mechanisms, and business and process models.  Due to the size and complexity of each of these four areas, we will only discuss topics that are directly related to our proposed research. 

Scientific Knowledge Objects

Scientific Knowledge Objects v.1  F. Giunchiglia, R. Chenu.

This document introduces the SKO and its associated structures as a response to the needs of a collaborative platform for the creation, dissemination and publication of Complex Artifacts and also as an option to the current paper centered scientific publication practices. The approach presented is based on three Organization levels (Data, Knowledge and Collection) and also three States (Gas, Liquid, Solid) that regulate the properties and operations allowed at each level.

Scientific Knowledge Objects Appendix v.1  F. Giunchiglia, R. Chenu.

This document is a complement to the Scientific Knowledge Objects technical report. The chapters of this document roughly correspond with the chapters in the main document where implementation considerations and other details, that were not included in the main document but still considered important for the approach, are given.

Empirical Analysis

Exploring and Understanding Scientific Metrics in Citation Network  N. Krapivin, M. Marchese and Fabio Casati.

This paper explores scientific metrics in citation networks in scientific communities, how they differ in ranking papers and authors, and why. In particular we focus on network effects in scientific metrics and explore their meaning and impact. We initially take as example three main metrics that we believe significant; the standard citation count, the more and more popular h-index, and a variation we propose of PageRank applied to papers (called PaperRank) that is appealing as it mirrors proven and successful algorithms for ranking web pages and captures relevant information present in the whole citation network. As part of analyzing them, we develop generally applicable techniques and metrics for qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing such network-based indexes that evaluate content and people, as well as for understanding the causes of their different behaviors. We put the techniques at work on a dataset of over 260K ACM papers, and discovered that the difference in ranking results is indeed very significant (even when restricting to citation-based indexes), with half of the top-ranked papers differing in a typical 20-element long search result page for papers on a given topic, and with the top researcher being ranked differently over half of the times in an average job posting with 100 applicants.

Unsupervised Key-Phrases Extraction from Scientific Papers Using Domain and Linguistic Knowledge  Mikalai Krapivin, Maurizio Marchese, Andrei Yadrantsau, Yanchun Liang.

The domain of Digital Libraries presents specific challenges for unsupervised information extraction to support both the automatic classification of documents and the enhancement of users’ navigation in the digital content. In this paper, we propose a combined use of machine learning techniques (i.e. Support Vector Machines) and Natural Language Processing techniques (i.e. Stanford NLP parser) to tackle the problem of unsupervised key-phrases extraction from scientific papers. The proposed method strongly depends on the robust structural properties of a scientific paper as well as on the lexical knowledge that we are able to mine from its text. For the experimental assessment we have use a subset of ACM papers in the Computer Science domain containing 400 documents. Preliminary evaluation of the approach shows promising result that improves – on the same data-set – on state-of-the-art Bayesian learning system KEA from a minimum 27% to a maximum 77% depending on KEA parameters tuning and specific evaluation set. Our assessment is performed by comparison with key-phrases assigned by human experts in the specific domain and freely available through ACM portal.

Focused Page Rank in Scientific Papers Ranking  Mikalai Krapivin, Maurizio Marchese.

We propose Focused Page Rank (FPR) algorithm adaptation for the problem of scientific papers ranking. FPR is based on the Focused Surfer model, where the probability to follow the reference in a paper is proportional to its citation count. Evaluation on Citeseer autonomous digital library content showed that proposed model is a tradeoff between traditional citation count and basic Page Rank (PR). In contrast to basic Page Rank, proposed Focused Surfer model suffers less from the "outbound links" problem. We believe that FPR algorithm is closer to reality because highly cited papers are more visible and tend to attract more citations in future. This is in accordance with the one of the most significant principles of Scientometrics. No need for lexical analysis of the domain corpus and simplicity of implementation are among the strong points of the proposed model and make the proposed ranking technique attractive for academia digital libraries.

Is peer review any good? An analysis framework and large-scale experiments. Fabio Casati, Maurizio Marchese, Azzurra Ragone, Matteo Turrini

Presented at EUROPEAN COMPUTER SCIENCE SUMMIT - ECSS 2009 - 5th Annual INFORMATICS-Europe Meeting - 8-9 October 2009, Paris - slides of the talk given at the Summit can be found here.

Lifecycle, Processes, and Resources

Universal Resource Lifecycle Management  M. Baez, F. Casati, M. Marchese.

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them.

Gelee: Cooperative Lifecycle Management for (Composite) Artifacts. Marcos Báez, Cristhian Parra, Fabio Casati, Maurizio Marchese, Florian Daniel, Kasia di Meo, Silvia Zobele, Carlo Menapace, Beatrice Valeri ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009: 645-646, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-10383-4_50

Credit Attribution

Propagation of Opinions in Structural Graphs  N. Osman, C. Sierra, J. Sabater-Mir.

Trust and reputation measures are crucial in distributed open systems where agents need to decide whom or what to choose. Existing work has mainly focused on the reputation of single entities, neglecting their position amongst others and its effect on the propagation of trust. This paper presents an algorithm for the propagation of reputation in structural graphs. It allows agents to infer their opinion about unfamiliar entities based on their view of related entities. The proposed mechanism focuses on the “part of ” relation to illustrate how reputation may flow (or propagate) from one entity to another. The paper bases its reputation measures on opinions, which it defines as probability distributions over an evaluation space, providing a richer representation of opinions.

Publishing Industry and Business Models

.

"Internet-based review models for scientific knowledge: a radical innovation?", Pier Franco Camussone, Roberta Cuel, Diego Ponte

Accepted at the 11th European Conference on Knowledge Management, Famalicao, Portugal, September, 2-3, 2010.

Communities

Infraestructura web para comunidades y recursos cientificos - Modelo, servicios y metricas - Cristhian Daniel Parra Trepowski
Degree thesis (in spanish), whose content has been developed as part of the LiquidPub project itself.

With the advent of Web era and specially with the current boom of social networking, the scenario in which scientific knowledge is created and disseminated has radically changed. The oportunities of this new scenario have not been fully harnessed yet, specially when it comes to the exploration of groups or communities that naturally arise, evolve and disapear in the scope of scientific research.  In this thesis we analyze the problems and challenges of defining and modeling communities. We stress the importance of identifying such communities with the goal of improving the search capability and stablish the foundations for fairer evaluation methods. This thesis outline (i) a conceptual model for the definition, discovery, maintenance and use of such communities, (ii) the design and implementation of a service infraestructure to interact with scientific entities and communities of the model, and (iii) the design and implementation of a resource space management system that provides seamless access to papers, experiments, presentations, authors or any other scientific resource available and identifiable by an URI (uniform resource identifier).  Furthermore, new evaluation metrics are proposed for scientific work and scientists based on the communities concept as a starting point for future work on the subject.

Discovering scientific communities using conference network - Alejandro Mussi
The book presents a complete model and a tool for the detection of scientific communities based on the relations between conferences (Degree thesis).

Other related publications

A Formal Definition of Culture  Aliaksandr Birukou, Enrico Blanzieri, Paolo Giorgini, Fausto Giunchiglia.

Globalization makes culture no more bound to a geographical area, race or religion. Multi-national companies, software developers, scientists need to take into account cultural differences when delivering products to people. The first step in dealing with culture consists in defining and representing culture of the targeted community. AI literature addressed issues of sociality, collaboration, and coordination in agent societies, but did not target the problem of defining and representing culture of a community. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of culture of a set of agents. It generalizes existing definitions of culture and it is operational in the sense that it can be applied for characterization and comparison of culture(s) existing in various communities.

Resource Space Management Systems Baez, M., Casati, F.  In Proceedings of the European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2009), Eindhoven, The Netherlands. (Published here)

LiquidPub: Services at Service of Science invited talk by Fabio Casati at ECOWS 2009 (European Conference on Web Services).

Towards an Abstraction Layer for Scientific Services Marcos Baez.  In Proceedings of the PhD Symposium of the 7th International Joint Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009), Stockholm, Sweden, November 26, 2009.

Domain-specific Mashups: From All to All You Need. Stefano Soi and Marcos Baez. Second International Workshop on Lightweight Integration on the Web, ICWE 2010 (to appear).

A LiquidPub Note (v.2.0): On Credit Attribution and its Imposed Restrictions on the SKO Model. Nardine Z. Osman, Jordi Sabater, Carles Sierra. January 26, 2009

Towards an Open/Web 2.0 Scientific Publishing Industry? Preliminary Findings and Open Issues. Roberta Cuel, Diego Ponte, Alessandro Rossi

Designing Wisdom through the Net. The Passion of Ranking. Gloria Origgi, in H. Landermore, J. Els-ter (ed.) Collective Wisdom, Cambridge University Press

On the Epistemic Value of Reputation? The place of ratings and reputational tools in knowledge organization. Gloria Origgi and Judith Simon.

Science and E-Commons. Luc Schneider. 7th European Conference on Philosophy and Computing - ecap09

MyChoice & Traffic Lights of Trustworthiness: Where Epistemology Meets Ethics in Developing Tools for Empowerment and Reflexivity. Judith Simon.

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS 3.0.: The End of the Scientific Paper? The Beginning of What?. Gloria Origgi and Judith Simon.

Second Order Epistemology. Gloria Origgi.

On the Social Significance of Publication. Roberto Casati.

Towards open source science? An analysis of Web 2.0 based initiatives in the scientific publishing sector. Roberta Cuel, Ralf Gerstner, Diego Ponte. Conference: 3rd FLOSS International Workshop on Free/Libre Open Source Software. Location: Universitа degli Studi di Padova, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Padua, Italy Dates: July, 2-3 2009

Information-Based Reputation. Carles Sierra and John Debenham. First International Conference on Reputation: Theory and Technology (ICORE 2009), Gargonza, Italy. Editor: Mario Paolucci. Year: 2009

Personalized recommendation via integrated diffusion on user-item-tag tripartite graphs Text. Zi-Ke Zhang, Tao Zhou, Yi-Cheng Zhang. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1989 Submitted for publication to Physica A

Social Computing and the Social Sciences. Giuseppe Veltri (Post-Doc Nicod), Gloria Origgi. Report for the project TGE ADONIS "Social Tools for Web evaluation of research in social sciences". December 2008.

Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era. Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati. Full text available at: http://wiki.liquidpub.org/mediawiki/upload/9/9b/Liquid-journal-proposal_v0.13.pdf

The Anatomy of a Web 2.0 Scientific Knowledge Object. Roberto Casati, Gloria Origgi, Luc Schneider, Giuseppe Veltri. Full text available at: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddwqbg4q_0ctwn35cx&hl=en