Currently there is a deluge of ‘off-piste’ collaborative authoring going on in Open Science, the adoption of: software versioning systems like GitHub for writing; simulations and code in platforms like Jupyter; or in ‘real time’ web authoring ‘operational transformation algorithm’ based software like Etherpad. Yes, the ‘digital plumbing’ of this publishing flood is just not in place. How do we ID these documents, reuse them for example? These questions have been asked and answered before, but are outside the fast moving, forward looking tech world. As an example, Ted Nelson coined the term ‘transclusion’ (Nelson 1987) back in the ‘80s. Transclusion is a step on from the ‘hyperlink’, another Nelson term, where not just the link of a target is included in a document but instead the whole content (AKA live linked embedding). Currently if you want to link and include another document fragment in your document with persistence, it’s unlikely to work. The panelists will explore how this exciting field can better support research. |