Deconstructed and decentralized scholarly communication

@hvdsomp
Jisc/CNI Conference, July 2nd 2018, Oxford, UK
Herbert Van de Sompel
@hvdsomp
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Deconstructed and Decentralized Scholarly Communication

@hvdsomp
An Alternative Scholarly Communication System
• Aligned with Decentralized Web Concepts
• Decoupled Functions of Scholarly Communication
• Contributor-Centric
• Institution Enabled

@hvdsomp
Decentral Web Motivation: Social Network Silos
• Some massive central portals dominate the web
• Service is smooth, free; the user is the product
• No mobility; the user not in control of (moving) her data
• No interoperability; different APIs (if any) for different platforms
• Functionality contained within a portal, can’t be reused on content that
resides in other portals
Tim Berners-Lee (2011) Socially aware cloud storage.
https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CloudStorage.html
Put the user back in the driver’s seat by means of user owned “pods”
that store the user’s resources. Third parties are granted access.
Introduce cross-pod applications.
Exemplified by MIT’s Solid project, see https://solid.mit.edu

@hvdsomp

@hvdsomp
Decentral Web for Scholarly Communication: dokie.li
Sarven Capadisli (2017) dokieli
https://dokie.li/

@hvdsomp
dokie.li Features
• A client-side application that can perform CRUD operations against pods
• Supports a wide range of standards, e.g. WebID, FOAF, OpenID
Connect, ACL, LDP, LDN, AS2, schema.org, Web Annotation, CC,
CiTO, PROV-O,, …
• Application functionality:
• Editor (HTML+RDF) for decentralized article publishing, reviewing,
annotating
• A platform for social interactions, e.g. share, request review
• Can be integrated with existing centralized scholarly infrastructure, e.g.:
• ORCID profiles support expressing WebID, pod location
• Authentication & Authorization based on ORCID OpenID Connect

@hvdsomp
• Aligned with Decentralized Web Concepts
• Decoupled Functions of Scholarly Communication
• Contributor Centric
• Institution Enabled

@hvdsomp
Functions of Scholarly Communication
• Registration: Allows claims of precedence for a scholarly finding
• Certification: Establishes validity of the claim
• Awareness: Allows actors in the system to remain aware of new
claims
• Archiving: Preserves the scholarly record over time
Roosendaal and Geurts (1997) Forces and Functions in Scientific Communication.
http://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/conferences/crisp97/roosendaal.html

@hvdsomp
The Paper Journal System

@hvdsomp
The Preprint Rebels - Decoupling Registration from Certification
Paul Ginsparg (2001) Creating a global knowledge network.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/physics/blurb/pg01unesco.html

@hvdsomp
The Preprint Rebels

@hvdsomp
The Rethinking Scholarly Communication Dreamers
Van de Sompel et al (2004) Rethinking Scholarly Communication.
https://doi.org/10.1045/september2004-vandesompel

@hvdsomp

@hvdsomp
• The researcher has a personal domain for scholarly communication
• Not institution bound, but truly personal
• A researcher pod for scholarly activities operates in the
researcher’s domain
• The researcher takes responsibility for publication and review
• David Rosenthal: “Persistence through Self-Interest”
• The researcher pod functions include:
• self-publishing: the researcher’s papers, overlay reviews,
comments, annotations, …
• notifying: the discipline-oriented social network glue
Contributor Centric

@hvdsomp
• A researcher pod provides a comprehensive overview of the
researcher’s contributions
• The researcher pods are globally interoperable via support of a
suite of standards
• the essential standards exist
• the tools are currently experimental but robust versions can be
devised
Contributor Centric

@hvdsomp
• Institutions provide a hosting platform and operational support for
their researchers’ pods
• A researcher’s domain resolves to the institutional platform
• Institutions archive their researchers’ contributions by monitoring
their pods and/or receiving notifications from those pods, and
capturing new resources
• Institutional and/or cross-institutional archives
• Can be achieved using a range of existing technologies
• Access to resources in the archive must be seamless
Institution Enabled

Personal Researcher Pods, Cross-Institutional Archive

Mobility & Persistence: Alice Changes Institution

Mobility & Persistence: Carol Leaves Academia

@hvdsomp
• Persistently linking to artifacts:
• Alice moving from A to B: She holds on to her domain, links
keep working
• Carol gives up on her pod: Technologies exist to make links to
their artifacts lead directly into the archive, e.g. PIDs, Robust
Links
Mobility & Persistence

@hvdsomp
• A different kind of institutional repository
• Contributor-centric instead of document-centric
• Disciplinary component provided by social network functionality
• Comes with:
• Built-in portability
• Archive-readiness
• Features:
• Registration decoupled from certification
• Holdings are in the open, libre
• Overlay services free or commercial
Think of Researcher Pods as …

@hvdsomp
• Similar functionality can be achieved via innovative multi-user
platforms
• Successful platforms get bought, others disappear or struggle,
few exceptions exist
• About 200 libraries give $1500-$3000 annual support to
arXiv.org
• Many academic institutions have been around for a long time
Researcher Pods and Platforms

@hvdsomp
• Through industrialization of scholarly communication, we have
forgotten it is a social activity
• Communication runs via intermediaries
• Technologies exist to re-introduce the social component in a scalable
way
• Doing so can re-instantiate the Republic of Letters:
• Letter => Publication in researcher pod
• Postal service => Notifications from researcher to peers
• Review letters => Publications in peer pods
• Postal service => Notifications from peers to researcher
Researcher Pods and the Republic of Letters

@hvdsomp
Why will this never happen?
Discussion

@hvdsomp
Herbert Van de Sompel
Team leader of prototyping team at
the research library, Los Alamos
National Laboratory
Thankyou

Deconstructed and decentralized scholarly communication

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