Library 2.015 Conference: An Open Dialog About the Future of Libraries

The Library 2.0 Virtual Worldwide Conference series aims to create an open dialog about the future of libraries in the digital age. At Library 2.015, the fifth conference in the series, thousands of participants gathered online to share their knowledge, experience, and ideas on the evolution of libraries and the information profession. This article reports on some highlights of the October 20, 2015, conference. Archived conference presentations remain free, online, and open to all at http://tinyurl.com/Libr2015presentations

Leveraging Public Knowledge Project\u27s Open Conference Systems for Digital Scholarship

The Media History Exchange (MHX) is an archive, social network, conference management tool, and collaborative workspace for the international, interdisciplinary community of researchers studying the history of journalism and communication. It opens a new scholarly space between the academic conference and the peer-reviewed journal by archiving “born digital” conference papers and abstracts that frequently have not been saved previously. In the spring of 2017, MHX migrated to the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Conference Systems. If your library is interested in expanding its digital scholarship offerings to include conference support, or offers its own library-focused conference, this technology might be exactly what you need. Co-author: Elliot King, Ph.D. (Loyola University Maryland

Connexions: Create Globally, Educate Locally

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersFounded in 1999, Connexions (http://cnx.org/) was built upon the philosophy that high-quality, open-licensed scholarly materials can revolutionize the way we think about education. Built upon a core of open software and driven by innovators in the open education movement, Connexions has made it possible for authors worldwide to publish content that teachers and learners can rip, mix, and burn to develop customized learning solutions at no cost. Authors create learning objects, called modules, that can be assembled into online courses, printed textbooks, or academic journals. All content in the Connexions repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, giving educators the tools and materials necessary to create unique works tailored to the needs of their students and colleagues. As the Connexions content repository continues to grow, traditional educational consumers will find themselves in a position to become producers, taking full advantage of the knowledge available in a global, digital society.Rice University; Hewlett Foundatio

Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering

We present a new kind of question answering dataset, OpenBookQA, modeled after open book exams for assessing human understanding of a subject. The open book that comes with our questions is a set of 1329 elementary level science facts. Roughly 6000 questions probe an understanding of these facts and their application to novel situations. This requires combining an open book fact (e.g., metals conduct electricity) with broad common knowledge (e.g., a suit of armor is made of metal) obtained from other sources. While existing QA datasets over documents or knowledge bases, being generally self-contained, focus on linguistic understanding, OpenBookQA probes a deeper understanding of both the topic---in the context of common knowledge---and the language it is expressed in. Human performance on OpenBookQA is close to 92%, but many state-of-the-art pre-trained QA methods perform surprisingly poorly, worse than several simple neural baselines we develop. Our oracle experiments designed to circumvent the knowledge retrieval bottleneck demonstrate the value of both the open book and additional facts. We leave it as a challenge to solve the retrieval problem in this multi-hop setting and to close the large gap to human performance.Comment: Published as conference long paper at EMNLP 201

Adaptation of DSpace to the Specific Needs of the Agricultural Sciences and Technology Community

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersThe aim of this project is to explore the customization of DSpace according to the use of controlled vocabularies. The plug-in shall be easy–to–install modules available free for download on the DSpace site. The objective is the adaptation of DSpace to the specific needs of the Agricultural Sciences and Technology community in order to assure quality in metadata creation. Knowledge Organization Systems such as the AGROVOC thesaurus provide mechanisms for sharing information in a standardized manner by recommending the use of common semantics.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation

Indian Contribution to Open Access Scholarly Publishing: A Case Study of DOAJ

India has been a cradle of knowledge for thousands of years. Presently it has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race due to one of the largest higher education system in the world. It generates a lot of information in the form of research papers, project reports, books, conference papers, theses, dissertations, articles, and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to preserve, manage and make it accessible to the academic community in particular for sharing and visualizing their innovations for the betterment of society as a whole. The present study attempts to evaluate the initiatives taken by India to make this intellectual output accessible for all by publishing them in Open Access journals. The results revealed that India is continuously contributing in Open Access scholarly publishing as some of the premier institutions, particularly in the science and technology area, are providing open access to their research publications. The position of India in terms of number of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is 7th in the world, well ahead of countries such as China, Australia, and Japan

ONE CONFERENCE, MANY OPTIONS: THE WAYS TO SORT YOUR KNOWLEDGE IN A CONFERENCE

Academic conferences, especially in the field of information systems, attract specialists the world over who attend, present, exchange knowledge, network, and build relationships in the academic world. One of the main benefits of a conference as regards attendees is the opportunity to meet other people with similar specializations. For knowledge sharing to take place in a conference, attendees need to identify ways of sorting and selecting the appropriate sources. This study looked into the use of technological channels utilized in the framework of a conference in an IS conference. It takes a novel approach to understanding how attendees search and locate content knowledge and knowledge on people. The results open a new perspective on how attendees source knowledge in an academic conference. Implications about the methods of sourcing knowledge in a conference are discussed

A Revised Publication Model for ECML PKDD

ECML PKDD is the main European conference on machine learning and data mining. Since its foundation it implemented the publication model common in computer science: there was one conference deadline; conference submissions were reviewed by a program committee; papers were accepted with a low acceptance rate. Proceedings were published in several Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial (LNAI) volumes, while selected papers were invited to special issues of the Machine Learning and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journals. In recent years, this model has however come under stress. Problems include: reviews are of highly variable quality; the purpose of bringing the community together is lost; reviewing workloads are high; the information content of conferences and journals decreases; there is confusion among scientists in interdisciplinary contexts. In this paper, we present a new publication model, which will be adopted for the ECML PKDD 2013 conference, and aims to solve some of the problems of the traditional model. The key feature of this model is the creation of a journal track, which is open to submissions all year long and allows for revision cycles.Comment: 13 page

Production and Spectroscopy of Heavy Hadrons at the LHC

Measurements of heavy flavor production and decay have featured prominently in the early results from the four large LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. These results provide tests of QCD models in a new energy region and point the way toward future measurements of CP violation and searches for new physics. An overview of open heavy flavor studies is presented here, focusing on how the new measurements extend our knowledge of this area of physics. Heavy quarkonia states at the LHC are summarized in other proceedings of this conference. I also discuss briefly how heavy flavor measurements are likely to evolve as LHC luminosities increase.Comment: proceedings for the XIV International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy (Hadron 2011), 13 pages, 9 figure