Liquid Publications: Scientific Publications Meet the Web

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. 1. “The Web changes everything”. But what about scientific publications? The current Web and advances in ICT have created new scenarios that radically change the knowledge production process: we have virtually unbounded storage capabilities and essentially no limits in our ability to interact with peers. This new networkand storage-mediated knowledge production process is impacting on all aspects of knowledge creation on all types of knowledge. The Web is becoming the most extensive knowledge repository that ever existed. As examples of 1 This is ongoing work. It is an evolution of the paper “Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money”ACM Ubiquity 8(3), Feb 2007. http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i03_fabio.html this trend, it is sufficient to consider the success of Wikipedia, or the upcoming initiatives such as Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) 2 , and the Faculty of 1000 initiatives 3 . Surprisingly, it is easy to observe that innovative forms of scientific publications are still lagging behind, and that the world of scientific publication 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. Indeed, dissemination of scientific knowledge 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. The problem is analogous and even worse for scientific books in general and textbooks in particular. Textbooks today are written, reviewed, printed, and distributed. For a given topic, professors have at their disposal several textbooks to choose from. However, it is rarely the case any single one of these textbooks matches the professor’s intended class topics and level of depth, and it is even more rare that the books are up to date, especially in a quickly evolving area such as IT. In the best cases, the authors “maintain” the book more or less up to date every few years, often with minor, poorly done extensions. As a consequence, a professor wanting to teach a class that is up to date is somehow forced to use parts of several books along with supplementary material taken from the Web. Again, there is little reuse, collaboration, and evolution in the generation of textbooks. Indeed, it is not surprising that some professors lately teach by using Wikipedia as a reference for the various topics, rather than textbooks. This paper explores how ICT and the lessons learned from i) software engineering and ii) the social Web can be applied to provide a radical paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated, and maintained. Indeed, software and scientific knowledge are more similar than they may look at a first sight. They are both complex “artistic” creation of the human mind which are “malleable” in that they can be modified and adapted (evolved) over time in several (sometimes wrong) directions and possibly in a collaborative fashion. This malleability property implies that, unlike other “artifacts” characteristics of other engineering disciplines (such as all kinds of hardware, e.g., electronic or mechanical), both software and knowledge can be easily taken and evolved by anybody based on their ideas, preferences, or needs. Many of the ideas developed for producing and handling software, such as evolutionary and agile software process models and open source software development, can be applied to the production and management of scientific knowledge. Another area from which we seek input is that of the social Web. Web technologies are providing us with ways to facilitate collaborative authoring and, equally interesting, collaborative evaluation of knowledge and artistic artifacts. Prime examples are measures of “interestingness” for pictures (see, e.g., flickr 4 ), or processes for evaluation of Wikipidia entries and Wikipedia-like content. The social Web is also showing us the way in which social networks are created and how 2 http://www.webscience.org/ 3 http://www.facultyof1000.com/