The presentation explores the trend towards a scholarly communication system that is friendly to machines. It presents 3 exhibits illustrating the trend and 1 exhibit illustrating inertia in the system. It makes the point that machine-actionability can be much easier achieved if content and metadata are available in Open Access and under a permissive Creative Commons license. It also observes that even with content and metadata openly available, new costs related to advanced tools to explore the scholarly record will emerge. Finally, it points at significant challenges regarding the persistence of the scholarly record in light of increasingly interconnected and actionable content and advanced tools to interact with it. The slides were used for a plenary presentation at the LIBER 2011 Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30 2011.

1. Towards Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication
herbert van de sompel
@hvdsomp
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/feuilllu/3021807255/

3. Patterson. Re-engineering the functions of journals OAI7 Workshop presentation http://
indico.cern.ch/contributionDisplay.py?sessionId=8&contribId=20&confId=103325

4. Patterson. Re-engineering the functions of journals OAI7 Workshop presentation http://
indico.cern.ch/contributionDisplay.py?sessionId=8&contribId=20&confId=103325

5. http://www.flickr.com/photos/irrezolut/2974930837/

6. • Augmentation of the scholarly record
with a machine actionable substrate
• Integration of datasets into the
scholarly record
• Exposure of scholarly process and its
integration in the scholarly record
Van de Sompel & Lagoze All Aboard: Toward a Machine-Friendly Scholarly Communication
System. In: The Fourth Paradigm. h"p://research.microso=.com/en-­‐us/collaboraAon/fourthparadigm/

7. • Unique identifiers (URI) for every Thing
• Typed Links, Vocabularies,
Ontologies (URI, RDF, RDFS, OWL)
• Ability to publish information about a Thing
• Ability for human and machine to look
Things up (HTTP)

8. Exhibit
1:
My
Work
in
this
Realm

9. OAI
Object
Reuse
&
Exchange
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/

10. Complex
Objects

11. Open
AnnotaAon
http://www.openannotation.org/

12. Yuma
Map
AnnotaAon
Haslhofer et. al. (2011) The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Data Model MMWeb 2011
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.5178

13. Memento:
Time
Travel
for
the
Web
2010 Digital Preservation Coalition
Digital Preservation Award
http://mementoweb.org

14. Version
NavigaAon:
Pic
of
the
Day
http://www.mementoweb.org/demo/picoftheday.mov

15. Version
NavigaAon:
Time
Series
Analysis
Van de Sompel et. al. An
HTTP-­‐Based
Versioning
Mechanism
for
Linked
Data
LDOW
2009
h"p://arxiv.org/
abs/1003.3661

16. Exhibit 2: Nanopublications
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/stannate/1369623187/

17. The Paper Deluge
• Too
much
scholarly
publicaAons
to
consume
• Too
hard
to
make
cross-­‐discipline
connecAons,
to
combine
exisAng
disparate
findings
to
arrive
at
new
insights
Palmer
et.
al.
(2007)
Weak
informa<on
work
in
scien<fic
discovery
Inf.
Process.
Manage.
43(3)
808–820
h"p://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2006.06.003
Ru"enberg
et.
al.
Advancing
transla<onal
research
with
the
Seman<c
Web
BMC
Bioinf.
8(suppl.
3)
S2
h"p://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-­‐2105-­‐8-­‐S3-­‐S2

18. Literature Mining
Verspoor et. al. The
textual
characteris<cs
of
tradi<onal
and
Open
Access
scien<fic
journals
are
similar.
BMC
Bioinforma:cs
2009,
10:183
h"p://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-­‐2105-­‐10-­‐183

19. Entity Identifiers & Ontologies
http://www.obofoundry.org/

20. Nanopublication
http://www.nanopub.org/

21. Nanopublication
http://www.nanopub.org/

22. Nanopublication
http://www.nanopub.org/

23. A Fix for the Nerds
Groth et. al. The Anatomy of a Nano-publication Information Services and Use 30(1), p.51-56,
2010 http://iospress.metapress.com/index/FTKH21Q50T521WM2.pdf

24. Publish, Merge, Search,
Reason, Predict, Integrate
Clare et. al. Exploring
the
Genera<on
and
Integra<on
of
Publishable
Scien<fic
Facts
Using
the
Concept
of
Nano-­‐publica<ons
ESWC 2011 https://svn.kwarc.info/repos/clange/conferences/eswc2011/sepublica/
proceedings/999990013/999990013.pdf

25. Mons (2011) Nanopublications OAI7 Workshop presentation http://indico.cern.ch/
contributionDisplay.py?sessionId=13&contribId=38&confId=103325

26. Smit & van der Graaf (2011) Journal Article Mining h"p://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/
PRCSmitJAMreport20June2011VersionofRecord.pdf

27. Exhibit 3: Executable Papers
http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=1446

28. Utopia
Reader
Attwood et al. (2009) Utopia document and the Semantic Biochemical Journal. EMBnet.news ,
15 (4). http://journal.embnet.org/index.php/embnetnews/article/viewArticle/45/151

29. h"p://www.executablepapers.com/about-­‐challenge.html

30. Executable
Paper:
Conceptual
View
This
space
intenAonally
blank.
Figure
1
of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064
goes
here
but
is
copyrighted.
Nowakowski
et al. (2011) The
Collage
Authoring
Environment Procedia
Computer
Science v4 http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064

31. Collage:
Authoring
and
Reading
This
space
intenAonally
blank.
Figure
2
of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064
goes
here
but
is
copyrighted.
Nowakowski et al. (2011) The
Collage
Authoring
Environment Procedia
Computer
Science v4 http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064

32. Collage:
Rendering
a
Paper
This
space
intenAonally
blank.
Figure
3
of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064
goes
here
but
is
copyrighted.
Nowakowski et al. (2011) The
Collage
Authoring
Environment Procedia
Computer
Science v4 http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.064

33. Link
Rot,
CitaAon
Rot,
Service
Rot
Sanderson et al. (2011) Analyzing
the
Persistence
of
Referenced
Web
Resources
with
Memento
Open
Repositories
Conference
Paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3459

34. Exhibit 4: Citation
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/themacinator/4183736814/

35. Citation
• Scholarly
record
expands:
• Papers
• Datasets
• NanopublicaAons
• Workflows
• So=ware
• …
• More
ways
to
get
credit

36. Move from Journal centric …

37. … to Contributor centric

38. Automatic Citation Graph
1. Article splash page in open access, crawl-enabled.
2. Splash page with recognizable References section
3. References that URI-link to the cited article
h"p://portal.acm.org

39. Open Data for Metrics
http://openurl.ac.uk/doc/data/thedata.html

40. Keep Your Eye On The Ball
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/3595141669/

41. Ownership
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vectorportal/5047619590/

42. Cost
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mammal/3455272493/

43. Persistence
The Long Now’s 10.000 Year Clock http://longnow.org/clock/prototype1/

44. Towards Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication
herbert van de sompel
@hvdsomp
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/feuilllu/3021807255/