Semantic Web and Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing

In my capacity as one of the Editors-in-chief of the Semantic Web journal (the other one is Krzysztof Janowicz; the journal is published by IOS Press), I was recently invited to talk about the journal at Allen Press’ Seminar Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing.  This seminar is an annual event which draws decision makers from the scholarly publishing industry to hear about and discuss recent developments and hot topics related to their profession. This year’s event had a session on “Semantic Enrichment”, and one on “Rethinking the Structure of Peer Review.” All presentations, including videos, are available from the Allen Press website.

The invited speaker of the “Semantic Enrichment” session was Pam Harley, Vice President, Product & Market Development of Semedica, a division of Silverchair.  Pam gave a high-level account of the possibilities and added value which comes with Semantic Enrichment, in a way suitable for the non-technical audience. I personally benefited particularly from the large variety of reasons for adopting Semantic Technologies in publishing which she presented and discussed in her talk (see also her slides).

My presentation (see also the slides) about the Semantic Web journal was part of the “Rethinking the Structure of Peer Review” session, and was focused on the open and transparent review process which we have adopted for the journal. After the presentation, throughout the event, I received ample feedback and remarks which in particular commended us for setting up a realistic improvement of the review process while avoiding radical changes which are likely to meet too much resistance from researchers. I certainly agree with this assessment. The presentation also contains a bit of information on how the journal is doing (in short: it’s doing great).

The seminar was a very enjoyable experience. In particular, it was enlightening to learn about publisher’s perspectives on scientific publishing, reviewing processes, and emerging revenue models. It was also nice to see that Semantic Web as a technology has a natural place in these discussions and is seeing more and more adoption in practice.

If you’re curious to learn more, have a look at the videos of the presentations.

[Author: Pascal Hitzler]