WEBSITE

How we read, write, and communicate science is changing profoundly under the influence of new technologies. In several fields within and outside of computer science, models, tools and standards are being developed that aim to enhance, enable or entirely replace formerly ingrained forms of scientific communication. Scientists, publishers, and vendors in various disciplines are developing methods and tools to improve the process of creation, reviewing and/or editing of scientific content; working on technologies and techniques to interpret, visualize, or connect scientific knowledge more effectively; and formulating concepts, tools, standards, and techniques for sharing multimodal and research data.

These developments are currently taking place in disparate and disconnected domains, including computational linguistics, bioinformatics, information science areas like the semantic web or web technologies in general, social sciences, and computer-human interface studies. Since the members of these communities rarely meet, there is almost no opportunity for synthesis of ideas or for new ideas to propagate. The purpose of the Future of Research Communication (FoRC) Network site is to bring together researchers from these different disciplines, whose core research goal is changing the formats, standards, and means by which we communicate science. We believe this can be a truly important step in bringing about this long-awaited sea change in scientific publishing. Please join us in this new endeavor.

Since our time at Dagstuhl will be short, we would like to utilize the period leading up to the workshop to allow everyone to become virtually acquainted with each other’s work and expertise. This website is intended to act as a communications hub for science publishing related material.  Specifically, we would like to start collecting demonstrations, papers, blogs, and other materials on this website, for perusal before, consideration during, and as an archive after the meeting. Discussions can commence on this platform with your fellow meeting attendees, and we would like to draft the final workshop document there are well, allowing people to author collaboratively both remotely and asynchronously as during the meeting, together.


The FoRC Organisers: 

• Tim Clark, MGH/Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA 
• Paul Groth, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands 
• 
Ivan Herman, W3C/CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 
• Eduard H. Hovy, ISI/USC, Los Angeles, CA, USA 
• David Shotton, Oxford University, UK
 
• Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs, Burlington, VT, USA