Nanopublication-based semantic publishing and reviewing: a field study with formalization papers

Area of Science:

• Scholarly communication
• Computational linguistics
• Semantic web technologies

Background:

• Increasing scientific literature volume hinders researchers' ability to stay current.
• Automated scientific article processing shows limited accuracy for complex extraction tasks.
• Existing methods struggle with machine-interpretability of scientific findings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate the feasibility of formally publishing high-level scientific claims in formal logic.
• To utilize nanopublications for representing the entire scientific publishing process, including reviews and decisions.
• To introduce formalization papers as a method for contributing machine-interpretable scientific claims.

Main Methods:

• A field study involving formalization papers was conducted.
• Scientific claims were formalized into RDF-based nanopublications.
• The entire publication workflow, from submission to special issue publication, was managed using nanopublications.

Main Results:

• 15 submissions from 18 authors were processed through the formal publication workflow.
• The study demonstrated the technical and practical feasibility of the proposed approach.
• Participating authors reported high interest and confidence, with manageable difficulty despite technical interfaces.

Conclusions:

• Publishing scientific results with machine-interpretable semantics from the outset is achievable.
• This approach has the potential to significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the scientific endeavor.
• Formal logic and nanopublications offer a pathway to more accessible and processable scientific knowledge.