Extracting Core Claims from Scientific Articles

Authors : Tom Jansen, Tobias Kuhn

The number of scientific articles has grown rapidly over the years and there are no signs that this growth will slow down in the near future. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest developments in a scientific field.

To address this problem, we present here an approach to help researchers learn about the latest developments and findings by extracting in a normalized form core claims from scientific articles.

This normalized representation is a controlled natural language of English sentences called AIDA, which has been proposed in previous work as a method to formally structure and organize scientific findings and discourse.

We show how such AIDA sentences can be automatically extracted by detecting the core claim of an article, checking for AIDA compliance, and – if necessary – transforming it into a compliant sentence.

While our algorithm is still far from perfect, our results indicate that the different steps are feasible and they support the claim that AIDA sentences might be a promising approach to improve scientific communication in the future.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07678

Against capital

Author : Stuart Lawson

The ways in which scholars exchange and share their work have evolved through pragmatic responses to the political and economic contexts in which they are embedded.

So rather than being designed to fulfil their function in an optimal way, our methods of scholarly communication have been distorted by the interests of capital and by neoliberal logic.

If these two interlinked political forces – that suffuse all aspects of our lives – are the reason for the mess we are currently in, then surely any alternative scholarly communication system we create should be working against them, not with them. The influence of capital in scholarly publishing, and the overwhelming force of neoliberalism in our working practices, is the problem.

So when the new ‘innovative disrupters’ are fully aligned with the political forces that need to be dismantled, it is questionable that the new way of doing things is a significant improvement.

URL : http://stuartlawson.org/2017/07/against-capital/

 

Valoriser les ressources numériques alternatives dans les bibliothèques publiques : un vecteur d’opportunités pour le développement des biens communs

Auteur/Author : Hans Dillaerts

Les ressources numériques alternatives peuvent être définies comme des ressources relevant du domaine public ou des ressources numériques diffusées sous la forme d’une licence libre. La place qu’occupent ces ressources dans les bibliothèques publiques est encore marginale.

Force est de constater que les politiques documentaires des bibliothèques publiques s’articulent prioritairement autour de l’offre commerciale portée par les éditeurs. Alors qu’il paraît évident que l’intégration et la valorisation de ces ressources libres au cœur des politiques documentaires permettraient non seulement aux bibliothèques de proposer une offre plus riche et plus diversifiée, mais aussi de valoriser la richesse littéraire, culturelle et artistique qui se développe sur le Web en dehors de la sphère marchande.

Quelles sont ces ressources numériques alternatives ? Comment opérer et construire une offre documentaire complémentaire des ressources physiques ? Quels enjeux pour les bibliothèques, le métier et les missions des bibliothécaires?

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01561437

 

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Authors : Jonathan P. Tennant, Jonathan M. Dugan, Daniel Graziotin, Damien C. Jacques, François Waldner, Daniel Mietchen, Yehia Elkhatib, Lauren B. Collister, Christina K. Pikas, Tom Crick, Paola Masuzzo, Anthony Caravaggi, Devin R. Berg, Kyle E. Niemeyer, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Sara Mannheimer, Lillian Rigling, Daniel S. Kat, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Josmel Pacheco-Mendoza, Nazeefa Fatima, Marta Poblet, Marios Isaakidis, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Sébastien Renaut, Christopher R. Madan, Lisa Matthias, Jesper Nørgaard Kjær, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Cameron Neylon, Sarah Kearns, Manojkumar Selvaraju, Julien Colomb

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure?

Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research.

With the advent of Web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review.

We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation.

Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform current models while avoiding as many of the biases of existing systems as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages.

We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that, at least partially, resolves many of the technical and social issues associated with peer review, and can potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system.

Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.

URL : A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12037.1

 

Searching Data: A Review of Observational Data Retrieval Practices

Authors : Kathleen Gregory, Paul Groth, Helena Cousijn, Andrea Scharnhorst, Sally Wyatt

A cross-disciplinary examination of the user behaviours involved in seeking and evaluating data is surprisingly absent from the research data discussion. This review explores the data retrieval literature to identify commonalities in how users search for and evaluate observational research data.

Two analytical frameworks rooted in information retrieval and science technology studies are used to identify key similarities in practices as a first step toward developing a model describing data retrieval.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06937

 

Interopérabilité et logiques organisationnelles. Ce qu’ouvrir ses données veut dire

Auteurs/Authors : Marie Després-Lonnet, Béatrice Micheau, Marie Destandau

Dans la perspective de l’ouverture des données publiques, nous accompagnons trois institutions qui gèrent des fonds liés à la musique, dans cette triple évolution technique, organisationnelle et politique.

L’objectif est de concevoir une « ontologie » qui servira d’appui à la description de la musique. Notre collaboration avec les experts a permis de saisir les tensions que ce projet génère, malgré la volonté collective de parvenir à une modélisation partagée.

Nous avons ainsi pu montrer que chaque institution porte un regard situé sur la musique comme pratique sociale et sur les objets et documents qu’elle détient. La recherche d’un modèle commun et qui pourrait s’appliquer globalement nécessite que chaque institution envisage les données et les concepts associés d’une façon plus globale et remette en partie en question ses modes de faire.

Notre étude montre que pour ne pas aboutir à un modèle totalement abstrait, il convient de voir la modélisation comme une forme de discours qui s’inscrit dans la continuité des écritures de notre patrimoine culturel : écritures vivantes, faites de négociations constantes entre normes et bricolages, nécessités organisationnelles et adaptation à des contraintes ponctuelles, dont nous retrouvons sans cesse les multiples traces, qui sont autant de matériaux pour nos recherches sur l’anthropologie des savoirs.

Les recherches présentées dans cet article ont été partiellement financé par le projet ANR-2014-CE24-0020 «DOREMUS.

URL : http://www.revue-cossi.info/numeros/n-2-2017-bricolages-improvisations-et-resilience-organisationnelle-face-aux-risques-informationnels-et-communicationnels/663-2-2017-revue-despres-lonnet-micheau-destandau