Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

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1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
2 Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
3 Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2513v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Digital Libraries, World Wide Web and Web Science
Keywords
document conversion, XSLT, RASH, Semantic Publishing, Digital Publishing, Semantic Web
Copyright
© 2016 Peroni et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Peroni S, Osborne F, Di Iorio A, Nuzzolese AG, Poggi F, Vitali F, Motta E. 2016. Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2513v1

Abstract

Purpose: this paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH ), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework , i.e. a set tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles, submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops.

Design: RASH has been developed in order to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow

Findings : the evaluation study confirmed that RASH can already be adopted in workshops, conferences and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML.

Research limitations: the evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technical savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g. for enabling additional conversion from/to existing formats such as OpenXML.

Practical implications: RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitate its automatic discovery, enable its linking to semantically related articles, provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and allow integration of data between papers.

Social implications: RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement).

Value: RASH focuses strictly on writing the content of the paper (i.e., organisation of text + semantic annotations) and leaves all the issues about it validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.