Scholarly HTML : Theme and presentations today

#scholarlyhtml

Martin Fenner, Peter Sefton and I have been discussing what Scholarly HTML is, what we intend to do over the weekend and then what Peter and we will do next week. This post is “my slides” to introduce the session…

We believe that HTML is the right way to develop future scholarly communication at all levels. Not only is it technically capable of what we want but it’s inherently democratic – anyone can play. HTML (and some closely associated W3C specs) does many things “right” but there are a few things it doesn’t do well (at least in people’s perception).

We want to address the following (at least) but also set a somewhat bounded scope (so this isn’t about research metrics, how to review papers, course materials, etc.):

• Packaging. Probably the major failing of HTML – when you get one with complex links or embedded material there is no standard way to proceed. We can change that.
  
• Principles. What IS SchHTML? We’ll try to come up with ca 10 principles over the weekend. Example: SchHTML should fail gracefully.
  
• Convention, microformats, folksonomies. A major strength of HTML. We plan to develop a strategy so that subcommunities can create their own ways of doing things.
  
• Use-cases. Some ideas for the weekend are: a data-journal (maybe in crystallography or chemistry); new vision for e-only articles; and theses.
  
• Advocacy. Why people should adopt SchHTML.
  
• Symmetric relationships in the publishing community. Currently most authors are disempowered; we need to recreate communities of practice (as the crystallographers do).
  

There will be thousands of microformats in SchHTML. Here are some common ones, and we might proof one or two this w/e:

• Bibliographic metadata
  
• Citations and references
  
• Scientific document structure
  
• Sub topics (computation, experimental…)
  

The presenters today (1530, Todd-Hamied, Chemistry Dept) are (probable order):

• Martin Fenner – overview of the architecture and process
  
• Peter Sefton – tools for SchHTML and examples
  
• Brian McMahon – a scholarly community that has developed its own publishing system
  

The hackfest is on Saturday and Sunday (Unilever Centre), ca 1000 – 1700 each day. If door closed there will be a mobile number to ring. ALL VISITORS SHOULD SIGN IN.