This is a list of the points I want to cover when introducing the session on Polemics. A list looks a bit dry but I promise to be polemical. And try to show some demos at the end. The polemics are constructive in that I shall suggest how we can change the #scholpub world by building a better one than the current one.

NOTE: Do not be overwhelmed by the scale of this. Together we can do it.

It is critical we act now

• Semantics/Mining is now seen as an opportunity by some publishers to “add value” by building walled gardens.
• Increasing attempts to convince authors to use CC-NC.
• We must develop semantic resources ahead of this and push the edges

One person can change the world

We must create a coherent community

• Examples:
  • Open Streetmap,
  • Wikipedia
  • Galaxyzoo
  • OKFN Crowdcrafting,
  • Blue Obelisk (Chemistry – PMR),
  • ?#scholrev

Visions

• Give power to authors
• Discover, aggregate and search (“Google for science”)
• Make the literature computable
• Enhance readers with semantic aids
• Smart “invisible” capture of information

Practice before Politics

• Create compelling examples
• Add Value
• Make authors’ lives easier
• Mine and semanticize current scholarship.

Text Tables Diagrams Data

• Text (chemistry, species)
• Tables (Jailbreak corpus)
• Diagrams chemical spectra, phylogenetic trees
• Data (output). Quixote

Material to start with

• Open information (EuropePMC, theses)
• “data not copyrightable”. Supp data, tables, data-rich diagrams
• Push the limits of what’s allowed (forgiveness not permission)

Disciplines/artefacts with good effort/return ratio

• Phylogenetic trees (Ross Mounce + PMR)
• Nucleic acid sequences
• Chemical formulae and reactions
• Regressions and models
• Clinical/human studies (tables)
• Dose-response curves

Tools, services, resources

    We need a single-stop location for tools

• Research-enhancing tools (science equiv of Git/Mercurial). Capture and validate work continuously
• Common approach to authoring
• Crawling tools for articles, theses.
• PDF and Word converters to “XML”
• Classifiers
• NLP tools and examples
• Table hackers
• Diagram hackers
• Logfile hackers
• Semantic repositories
• Abbreviations and glossaries
• Dictionaries and dictionary builders

   

Advocacy, helpers, allies

• Bodies who may be interested (speculative, I haven’t asked them):
  • Funders of science
  • major Open publishers
  • Funders of social change (Mellon, Sloane, OSF…)
  • SPARC, DOAJ, etc.
  • (Europe)PMC
• Crowdcrafting (OKF, am involved with this)
• Wikipedia