New scenarios in scholarly publishing and debate

Citation: Simon J. Buckingham Shum, Tamara Sumner (1998) New scenarios in scholarly publishing and debate. The Knowledge Web: Learning and Collaborating on the Net (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): New scenarios in scholarly publishing and debate
Tagged: scholarly publishing (RSS), argumentation (RSS), peer review (RSS), semantic publishing (RSS)

Summary

This book chapter discusses D3E, the Digital Document Discourse Environment (open source code, description, screenshots, other references). D3E centralizes the discussion about an article, integrating with the peer-review process.

Good scholarly peer review, they say, is open, informed, dynamic, carefully constructed, cumulative, and preserved. D3E is based on these aspects, and especially focuses on opening and preserving a dynamic, easily-findable debate about a publication.

Probably one of the earliest papers about semantic publishing.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

As of 2010, 12 years after this was published, most scholarly communication still relies on the paper model ('papyrocentric'-a term credited to Stevan Harnard) in some respects. However, a closer examination would show that much has changed at least in distribution of texts online since that time. (Consider Harnad, Stevan. "Publicly Retrievable FTP Archives For Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal." which sparked a downloadable book: preprints and self-archiving are mainstream in some disciplines. This also could be relevant for envisioning and justifying peer-review post-publication. The dimensions of peer review that they emphasize could be used elswhere.