Amy Guy co-organising workshop at Extended Semantic Web Conference

The workshop is co-located with ESWC2017, but by no means limited to Semantic Web researches or even Computer Scientists. We welcome participation from any discipline or field of expertise. We also don't necessarily expect participants to be directly working on tools for academic publishing, but perhaps are interested to discuss how parts of their work could be applied to this area.

As a Web Scientist, I'm embarrassed on a daily basis that more of my community's work isn't on the Web. It's so easy to publish, disseminate knowledge, and receive feedback online, yet academic communications remains hampered by the requirements of for-profit publishing companies and outdated ('traditional') ideas about scholarship. This isn't an un-discussed topic of course, and steps are being taken from a number of angles to address the challenges (technical and social) of creating reliable Web-based open academic publishing workflows. Towards this, I am co-organising along with Sarven Capadisli (behind the #LinkedResearch initiative) and David De Roure (a FORCE11 cofounder), the first workshop on enabling decentralised scholarly communication. The aim is to bring together researchers who are frustrated with the state of academic publishing right now, and want to discuss how parts of their projects can fit together to effect change.

Experimenting with practicing what we preach, we're accepting submissions in HTML (or another accessible format most appropriate for conveying the authors' ideas), published at a domain of the author's choosing. No PDFs, paper-based page limits, EasyChair, or arbitrary publisher constraints. Our review process is open and we expect reviewers to publish their feedback in a similar manner. We hope to see creative, experimental submissions, works-in-progress, and people willing to shake up the status quo. We're also running an open call for blog posts answering: "I can't publish my academic work on the Web because..." which will seed a discussion session on the day.

See https://linkedresearch.org/events/eswc2017/ for the call and more information.