=Paper=
{{Paper
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|storemode=property
|title=Breaking the Paper Barrier and Publishing At the Speed of Thought
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1435/NoISE2015_paper_10.pdf
|volume=Vol-1435
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/ChapmanC15
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==Breaking the Paper Barrier and Publishing At the Speed of Thought==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1435/NoISE2015_paper_10.pdf
Breaking the Paper Barrier and
Publishing At the Speed of Thought
Katie Chapman and Chris Chapman
Pentandra Research Solutions, Logan, Utah, USA
{katie,chris}@pentandra.com
http://pentandra.com
Abstract. We are starting to see Semantic Web technologies being used
in our research papers and data. The next revolution will be publishing
knowledge at the speed of thought.
Keywords: Semantic Publication • Linked Data • Skywriting
In September 2007, Wired Magazine included an article by Thomas Goetz
entitled “Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments” [1], in which
Goetz discussed the incredible value of dark data—data that is filed away, never
to see the light of day. We believe that researchers are already well aware of
the understandings gained through research projects that led in unexpected di-
rections, revealed unwanted results, or simply left the researcher feeling painted
into a dead-ended corner. Such failed research efforts are powerful opportunities
to learn and often lead to important insights. Yet most of the time these in-
sights are not shared. According to Goetz, the reasons dark data remains dark
include storage costs, technology barriers, financial constraints, or career incen-
tives that encourage dissociation from negative and inconclusive research. Goetz
also shared efforts being made at the time to change the situation, such as the
Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, open notebook science, and others.
After acknowledging these contributions, Goetz wrote, “These are great first
steps. But freeing dark data should be the norm, not the exception. Once the
storage and format problems are solved, scientists will need easy ways to search
and retrieve each other’s data.” Think about how far we’ve come since 2007.
Data storage solutions abound and great strides have been made to lower the
barrier for the search and retrieval of data by the Linked Data community, in-
troducing outreach standards such as JSON-LD and RDFa. Yet, with all of this
progress, dark data has still been left in the dark.
Research—all research—has value. That value is independent of any grant
awarded, tenure attained, or publisher’s acceptance. The value lies in learning.
Knowledge, truth, and the pursuit of understanding something previously not
understood are the goals and purposes of research. Nowhere in any definition
of the word research have we read that research only has value if it produces
cherry-picked outcomes that make administrators, editors, grantors, and publish-
ers happy. And yet, due to the undeniable bias towards “positive” results—or
2 Breaking the Paper Barrier and Publishing At the Speed of Thought
what have been deemed as such—much of the rest of all research is sentenced
to a filing-cabinet death-by-obscurity. It does not have to be this way in today’s
scientific technology revolution.
Incentives are the key here. Because future job prospects, tenure, and public
acclaim all tend to revolve around journal publication, why would a researcher
want to take the time to go back, write out, format, narrate, and then attempt
to publish negative results that are likely to end up in unpretentious journals or
on personal blogs that often are not recognized as of much worth by the research
community, employers, or funding agencies? That’s a lot of effort and time for
something that will essentially provide no career or financial advantages for the
researcher.
That leaves two things we can do to bring dark data to light: one, change
the incentives involved in research to better reflect the value of negative or in-
conclusive research results, and two, remove the barrier of time and effort that
keeps a researcher from sharing this dark data in the first place. Ideally, these two
changes would occur simultaneously, but funding agencies and institutional poli-
cies tend to be incredibly slow to change. Social expectations are often equally
or even more sluggish to evolve. So we have a choice: do we sit around and wait
until publishers and institution administrators change incentives to publish dark
data? Or, do we find ways to make it worth sharing this dark data now?
If the time and effort barrier were removed from sharing nonconfirmatory
research, we believe that many researchers would gladly share those results even
if there were no external incentives. Open notebook science gives us a good
starting place, but we need to overcome the problem of data deluge [2] inher-
ent in many of the Web 2.0 approaches and start preserving knowledge, not
just notes. Semantic Web technologies applied to that sort of “record as you
research” mentality would produce human- and machine-understandable knowl-
edge that could be sorted by machines and handed to researchers on a silver
platter. Imagine if the data, analyses and conclusions, as well as the thoughts
and intents of the researcher—or in short, every aspect of the research process—
were preserved in context by intuitive, domain-specific research systems capable
of generating the underlying semantic representations automatically. The devel-
opment of open vocabularies expansive enough to preserve the entire research
process are a prerequisite to building such systems. Taking it a step further, if
that big-data amount of semantically understandable research was captured as a
researcher went along—at the speed of thought [3]—the negative or inconclusive
or downright befuddling results would be accessible without any extra effort.
The processes of researching and publishing would become distinct and sep-
arate from presenting the research results to a certain audience in, for example,
a paper. If the researcher wanted to write and submit a paper based on those
nonconfirmatory results, there would be nothing to prevent that. In fact, having
the entire research process preserved would make writing up such journal arti-
cles easier anyway. Other presentation formats could be created, such as video or
interactive media, without worrying that some important parameter or intricate
concept might be left out. But the biggest game changer is that all of that dark
data would come to light, and that the paper might not always be necessary.
Breaking the Paper Barrier and Publishing At the Speed of Thought 3
References
1. Goetz, T.: Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments. Wired Maga-
zine (2007), http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-10/
st_essay
2. Open Notebook Science (Drawbacks), Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/
index.php?title=Open_notebook_science&oldid=654594797#Drawbacks
3. Harnad, S.: The Future of Scholarly Skywriting. In: Scammell, A. (ed.) “i in the
Sky: Visions of the information future” Aslib (1999), http://users.ecs.soton.ac.
uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad99.aslib.html