Advancing open scholarship with semantic micro-contributions in the context of genuine semantic publishing

Advancing Open Scholarship with semantic micro-contributions in the context of genuine semantic publishing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Guiding Principles lay out crucial considerations towards reducing the barrier that machines face in the discovery, interpretation and reuse of research data.

Although great progress towards the adoption and implementation of the FAIR principles is apparent, there still remains a significant challenge in bringing FAIR to Open Scholarship. In particular, current practices in the preparation and dissemination of research results, namely as semi-structured manuscripts, can only be imprecisely interpreted by machines with contemporary language models.

In this talk, I will introduce the notion of genuine semantic publishing as an approach to authentically publish fine-grained knowledge representations as semantic micro-contributions. Semantic micro-contributions can be created with new tools, digitally signed, and published to a de-centralized network for discovery and use. While such tools and infrastructure greatly facilitate publication of FAIR research, is it enough to subvert community norms towards embracing a new form of Open Scholarship?

The Speaker

Dr. Michel Dumontier is the Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University and co-founder of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles. His research focuses on the development of computational methods for scalable and responsible discovery science. Dr. Dumontier obtained his BSc (Biochemistry) in 1998 from the University of Manitoba, and his PhD (Bioinformatics) in 2005 from the University of Toronto. Previously a faculty member at Carleton University in Ottawa and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Dr. Dumontier founded and directs the interfaculty Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University to develop socio-technological systems for responsible data science by design. His work is supported through the Dutch National Research Agenda, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Horizon 2020, the European Open Science Cloud, the US National Institutes of Health and a Marie-Curie Innovative Training Network. He is the editor-in-chief for the journal Data Science and is internationally recognized for his contributions in bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and semantic technologies including ontologies and linked data.