Pentandra Joins the W3C ROSC
Some really exciting news for the scholarly community was in my inbox this morning. A new W3C community group has been created, the Research Object for Scholarly Communication Community Group, with a goal to discuss the future of scholarly communication.
Quoting from their charter:
The primary goal…is to provide a platform for scholars, librarians, publishers, archivists and policy makers to exchange requirements and expectations for supporting a new form of scholarly communication, i.e. making the actual research assets available as first-class objects to enable better reuse and reproduce of research results and knowledge. These research assets, including data used and generated in an investigation, methods used for producing the data, as well as people and organisations involved in the study, are what we call Research Objects.
I am curious to explore the relationship between research objects and what we are working on with research cases.
While this group has explicitly stated that they will not be publishing specifications, it is exciting to see this kind of dialog starting to happen. Having this evolve under the W3C makes sense as well, since research is cross-disciplinary and the actual dissemination of research needs to take place over the web to be accessible to all. Isn’t this why the Internet was created to begin with?
We are really excited to be part of this change in the way research has been disseminated for hundreds of years.
PS: We live in a world of acronym soup, and when we saw the acronym for ROSC we had a good laugh. We have been working on a soon-to-be-open-source project composed of the domain-agnostic guts of Geungle—essentially based on the model of a case. We have named the project ROC. A funny coincidence of similar naming! (Watch for an announcement about ROC soon!)