Call for Linked Research

Identifier
https://csarven.ca/call-for-linked-research
Published
License
CC BY 4.0
Purpose
To encourage the “do it yourself” behaviour for sharing and reusing research knowledge.

Scientists and researchers who work in Web Science have to follow the rules that are set by the publisher; researchers need to have read and reuse access to other researchers work, and adopt archaic desktop-native publishing workflows. Publishers try to remain as the middleman for society’s knowledge acquisition.

Nowadays, there is more machine-friendly data and documentation made available by the public sector than the Linked Data research community. The general public asks for open and machine-friendly data, and they are following up. Web research publishing on the other hand, is stuck on one ★ (star) Linked Data deployment scheme. The community has difficulty eating its own dogfood for research publication, and fails to deliver its share of the promise.

There is a social problem. Not a technical one. If you think that there is something fundamentally wrong with this picture, want to voice yourself, and willing to continue to contribute to the vision of the Web, then please consider the following before you write your research:

Linked Research: Do It Yourself
  1. Publish your research and findings at a Web space that you control.
  2. Publish your progress and work following the Linked Data design principles. Create a URI for everything that is of some value to you and may be to others e.g., hypothesis, workflow steps, variables, provenance, results etc.
  3. Reuse and link to other researchers URIs of value, so nothing goes to waste or reinvented without good reason.
  4. Create a strong user experience in the spirit of science: Use screen and print stylesheets. Create a copy of a view for the research community to fulfil organisational requirements. Design interactive user-interfaces for improved communication and education.
  5. Announce your work publicly so that people and machines can discover it.
  6. Have an open comment system policy for your document so that any person or machine can give feedback.
  7. Help, encourage, and motivate others to do the same.

There is no central authority to judge the value of your contributions. You do not need permission to publish! Control your own research and communication.

See also: https://linkedresearch.org/.

Interactions

5 interactions

Paul Tyson replied on

Great initiative. But there aren't enough stars in current linked data definition to support it completely. I mean that data is not enough to communicate effectively. You need logic in the form of explicit propositions arranged in forms that are known to be sound (e.g. syllogisms). And you need rhetoric, or exposition, which on the web translates to effective hyperdocuments. This is partly addressed by your point 4, but the best rhetoric does not hide its arguments or evidence, but makes them easier to find and understand. This is more involved than just providing good stylesheets.

So to 5-star linked data I add a sixth for Logic, and a seventh for Rhetoric. I'm not sure yet what these will look like in RDF. Certainly RIF is a good start for logic, and is out-of-the-box compatible with RDF. As for rhetorical style, that is even dimmer for me, but at a minimum we need to explicitly link style features to their logical or rhetorical function, instead of losing this information when the stylesheet writer moves on to something else.

Anonymous Reviewer replied on

This is an extremely good initiative, however it is really not related to development Linked Data applications. What tools should we use to publish our research? What vocabularies? Do we have some software to help us? Finally, most researchers must publish their work on conference proceedings, journals, ecc.. how does that fits? How can I double-publish the content?

I think a discussion topic might fit better this initiative, at least its current stage.

Pieter Colpaert replied on

The author wants to bring to the attention a tool to disseminate research using Linked Data principles. While I like the subject of the paper and agree with the author that better dissemination for research like he recommends is needed, I don't think it's very relevant to this workshop. I would however suggest the author to try to submit his work to other workshops at different conferences.