Publication and Peer Review of Evolving Publications

1. Erik Sandewall Linköping University and KTH – Royal Institute of Technology Publication and Peer Review ofEvolving Publications

2. Why Evolving Publications? • The Internet is already the major instrument for the dissemination of scientific information • Information on the Internet can change at any time • The traditional concept of a 'publication' assumes that it is a fixed information object that can be preserved, copied, bought and sold, cited, peer reviewed, and so on • The purpose of the present project is to investigate a publication concept that is more in line with the character of the Internet

3. An Evolving Publication is... • ...is a container of information objects where additional objects can be added as time goes on, • ...containing a unique base document (usually), comments, amendments, collections of data, links to other (evolving) publications, etc, • ...is a preserving structure where information objects can only be added, never removed, and where contents are timestamped • ...is uniquely identified using an Internet-compatible identifier • ...has a well defined owner who has the authority to decide about the evolution of the publication's contents • ...although the contained information objects may have other authors

4. Issues that need to be studied • Use of evolving publications for various types of scientific results, in particular for situations where the contemporary publication paradigm is awkward • Styles of peer review of evolving publications, for the purpose of feedback to authors and for quality control • IPR issues for evolving publications: what are plausible rights arrangements for readers, for authors of information objects, and for owners of evolving publications • Technical implementation of evolving publications • Technical implementation of their peer review schemes

5. The Experimental Electronic Press • The purpose of the Experimental Electronic Press (XPEP) is to be a framework for exploration of new ways of organizing publication and access as usually done by publishers and libraries • Exploration of evolving publications is one major topic for the XPEP, but not the only one • The XPEP is a cooperation project between IDA at Linköping University and PI at KTH. (IDA = Department of Computer and Information Science; PI = the Division for the Infrastructure of Publishing, adjoined to the KTH Library) • Participants: Henrik Lundberg, John Olsson (IDA), Gunnar Carlsson (PI), Erik Sandewall (both)

6. Research types that seem to be very well suited for evolving publications • Explorative design projects, as done e.g. in computer science • Research resulting in collections of structured information, often with a complex structure such as a knowledgebase • Very large projects (modulo additional conditions)

7. Case: Publication of common knowledge • Large-scale sources of common knowledge are now becoming available, e.g. dbpedia, freebase, as well as specialized sources • Information in these should be seen as “raw materials” towards a full-fledged knowledgebase • Finishing requires working both with formal aspects, including formal verification of the structure, and with the factual correctness of the contents • The volume of this work makes it necessary to see a knowledgebase as a collection of “knowledge publications”, each of which is an evolving publication • We use our Common Knowledge Library (CKL) as a vehicle for experiments in this respect

8. Participating agents Knowledgebase Reviewing and Assessment Environment Other User Common Knowledge Library (CKL) Evolving publications containing common knowledge Other user Information Analysis Workbench Other user

9. Important Considerations(for the design on the previous slide) • Separation of development environment (workbench), publication environment (CKL), and reviewing environment • An evolving knowledgebase publication must be based on a contribution of structured knowledge together with an explanatory text • Feedback from users (questions and comments) should be collected, and responded to, in the evolving publication. Fairness requirements on authors and owners • Review and assessment should take both basic contribution and user feedback into account, as well as other sources

10. Additional Considerations wrt Implementation • All participating agents need to be able to download and upload knowledge modules and to work actively with them • Therefore, all the agents displayed above (and represented by boxes in the diagram) must be able to use the same or compatible software infrastructure for knowledgebase work • Message-passing between these agents will be needed, both for agent-readable and for user-readable messages. It should be an integrated part of the infrastructure, since messages will be cross-connected to knowledge contents

11. Current Status • Common Knowledge Library: Operational since 2007, gradually extended, contains more than 60.000 entities in its knowledgebase, each with a number of structured attributes • Information Analysis Workbench: Being used for developing and validating contributions to the CKL • Software agents for “Other users”: Will be based on the Leonardo software system which has been developed since 2006, and which has been field tested with a group of students during autumn 2009