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Moderators
·Roberto Casati
·Gloria Origgi
·Luc Schneider
·Judith Simon
·Giuseppe Veltri
Guest Panel
·Ahrash Bissel
·Veronica Boix Mansilla
·Katy Borner
·David Bourget
·Nicolas Bullot
·Cristiano Castelfranchi
·Steve Fuller
·Karim Gherab
·Grit Laudel
·Clifford Lynch
·Paolo Massa
·Enrico Negro
·Helen Nissenbaum
·Geoff Nunmberg
·Joseph Reagle
·Nicola Spotorno
·Bob Stein
·Dario Taraborelli
·Jesùs Vega
·Giuseppe Veltri
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It is nowadays a piece of received wisdom to say that the world of scientific publications has been revolutionized by the advent of the Web. Yet, if we look at the “core” unit of the circulation of knowledge, that is, the scientific journal article, it is in better shape than ever: Papers are nowadays easily distributed through the Web through the academic portals of scientific publications or through the open archives, their evaluation and impact analysis are available to anyone through software of impact analysis such as Publish or Perish, readers may share their favourite readings through collaborative filtering systems such as CiteULike, new tools such as GoogleScholar make easy to find references and measure citations.
Discussions around the way in which the format of the scientific paper should be transformed by the use of IT haven’t had a deep impact until now on the practices of producing knowledge that are shared by the scientific community. Our on-line workshop will try to understand why the paper is still so central in the e-Science, how realistically should we try to transform and update it in order to fit the new social environment of the Web 2.0 and 3.0, what are the first steps to undertake, what are the unavoidable constraints, how much “liquid” the paper should become in order to join the flow of socially distributed information that invades our screens without loosing its authority as evaluated piece of knowledge content. This interdisciplinary workshop gathers people from the humanities, the social sciences, the IT world and the Web studies, it mixes practitioners as well as intellectuals in order to “brainstorm” around what will become the scientific paper in the future. In partnership with
· LIQUIDPUBLICATIONS
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On publishing
Roberto Casati
I discuss the social significance of publication in the life of a scientific knowledge object (SKO). The importance of publication is made evident by the complex issue of unpublication (the strong version of retraction whereby a SKO is completely destroyed). Unpublication is a tempting option in the electronic world. I argue against the viability of unpublication, both on practical and on principled grounds related to the cascading entitlements of published paper.
Date of publication: 26 May 2009
Sifting through the Online Web of Knowledge
Eric Meyer
Ralph Schroeder
This essay examines how researchers gain access to knowledge at a time when scholarly communication and materials are increasingly moving online. This topic has so far mainly been discussed in terms of journal publication and readership. Here we take a broader view, including a variety of areas where knowledge production and dissemination is broader than journal publications and includes data and tools. A second reason to take a broader view extends the horizon still further, since scientific communication and collaboration are not just undergoing change within the research community, but also depend on wider changes such as the use of search engines and how they affect what can be found online generally. New search behaviours are particularly evident among a new generation of scholars and potential scholars. Hence we will look at changes in research as well as in the realm of online knowledge more broadly.
Date of publication: 16 March 2009
What Science can learn from Google?
Chris Anderson
According to Chris Anderson, we are at "the end of science", that is, science as we know it." The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age."
"At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."
Date of publication: 27 December 2008
Peer-to-peer review
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
I propose to focus, then, not just on the technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for such flourishing. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work.
Date of publication: 15 October 2008
Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science
David Koepsell
This paper argues that the golden age of science was never fully realized, and in the 20th Century became an unlikely ideal. Corporate and university cultures, combined with the realities of the marketplace for publishing, ensured that the ideal methodology of the sciences could not be put into practice. Only now, with the growth of the Open Source Movement, and the success of open wikis, can the scientific ideal, by which theories and hypotheses are aired for public and scientific scrutiny, flourish. But for this to happen, old notions of peer review, academic standards of publication and tenure review, and government sponsorship based upon the above, will all need to adjust accordingly.
Date of publication: 1 October 2008
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