upsl_ideas.rst

Implementing a Selected-Papers Network via Tagging in Existing Social Networks

What we need: WHO + WHAT subscription

A Selected-Papers Network enables open peer review via individuals recommending papers that they like, and choosing whose recommendations they wish to subscribe to (in selected topics). A core feature of this is the ability to subscribe to an intersection of WHO + WHAT, i.e. to select people whose interests overlap mine and whose judgment I trust, and to filter just those topics that interest me. First of all, note that this is different from what most social networks show you, e.g.

• Facebook: you select people to follow ("friend") but you get everything they post (typically "I'm at the mall buying shoes now!"). Unfortunately, Facebook lacks tagging and filtering support. For me, that makes Facebook just an avalanche of spam (which not coincidentally seems to match their current business model of shoving as much advertising in my face as possible).
• Google+: you can define different groups of people ("Circles")... but then you get everything they post, same as in Facebook.
• Reddit: shows you everyone's posts on a specific topic (WHAT); alternatively, shows all your friends' posts (WHO) on all topics.

Sorry, but for productive work we need to filter on both WHO+WHAT. Even with people whose every post is fascinating (e.g. John Baez), I don't have time to dig manually through all that traffic to find the one topic that I need to work on at a given moment. Multiply that traffic times all the people whose posts I might want to see, and you see the scale of the problem. Fortunately, WHO+WHAT subscription is possible, in some cases fairly directly (e.g. Twitter) or with a bit of work (e.g. Google+, Reddit).

Why not "roll your own" SP Net website?

Many sites (connotea.org, mendeley.com, researchgate.com etc.) have tried to create a nice garden for researchers to link to literature. Why not implement an SP net within such a site? It's been tried many times and just hasn't taken off because this walled-garden model suffers insoluble dilemmas:

• such a site first demands that a prospective user change how they work (i.e. register for and start using the new website); few people will do that.
• second, such a site yields no benefit -- because any posts he writes are locked into a website that no one else reads.

Each such site aspires to be the "Facebook of research communications", but the whole walled-garden dynamic is an insuperable barrier to uptake.

Embrace Fragmentation via Federation

Instead, I propose to solve these two dilemmas by working within the existing social networks

• people can just keep using the social network they're used to, using the standard hashtag mechanism they already know how to use (and whatever hashtags they already using as relevant to their work);
• their posts will be seen by huge numbers of people within those networks.
• of course, this usage is strictly "Balkanized" by the separate walled gardens: e.g. a Google+ user will only see traffic from other Google+ users. But it's a reasonable way to start experimenting with the approach and getting people to try it with very little effort.

In my view, it's a good thing there is no single, dominant player that owns the whole research social network space. I don't want a single player to own these data, control how they can be used, or lock out others from developing new usages. SP net data should be public and usable by anyone who wants to develop a better interface for publishing or peer review (such as the many existing websites like ResearchGate, Mendeley etc.). In other words, the SP net should be federated, a data-exchange standard and network, in which public data are shared among all sites that work with such data. That network standard ("Uniform Publish & Subscribe Locator") will take time to develop, but in the meantime we can establish a de facto cultural standard for how people tag recommendations and peer review comments. Everyone can immediately start using these tag conventions in their current social networks, as basic SP net working today.

An SP Net Tagging Standard Proposal

Any post could include simple "tag sentences" that each express a basic peer review statement, e.g.:

#spnetwork #compbio #mustread #arxiv12345

means the post author recommends arXiv paper 12345 as crucial for his work in computational biology. The basic elements:

• prefix #spnetwork identifies this as an SP network sentence.
• basic sentence structure: audience-subject-verb-object, where individual elements may be omitted depending on context. e.g. #compbio #mustread #arxiv12345.
• audience means the intended audience to whom the sentence is addressed, i.e. one or more topic-groups.
• subject if omitted, the post-author.
• object is the ID of the publication being discussed.
• verb allows us to make different statements about that publication.
• adverb: e.g. to express different levels of confidence in a statement.

Peer review and recommendation verbs

General user actions

• #share: you are simply forwarding someone a link to the paper.
• #comment: this post comments on the paper
• #question: this post asks a question about the paper.
• #agree: you agree with the paper. This will typically be used as a lightweight "upvote / downvote" poll, an easy way for people to declare themselves on one side or another of an argument.
• #disagree: you disagree with the paper.

Peer review actions

• #valid: the paper's claims meet your field's standards of evidence, in your judgment.

• #uncertain: the evidence for a claim is not strong enough

• #unsupported: no valid evidence for a claim

• #wrong: you're sure a claim is incorrect (provide your evidence!)

• #precedes: one of the paper's claims appears to have already been published by previous publication A. e.g.:

  #spnetwork #pubmed12345 #precedes #arxiv12345
  

• #assessing: you intend to assess the paper's validity, at least in part.

• #assessingAll: you can assess all aspects of the paper, because you are expert in all aspects of the paper, i.e. you have performed similar analyses using similar methods on similar data.

• #exit: you intend no further consideration of this paper (barring unforeseen new information).

• #majorresult: this statement applies to the paper's main claim(s)

• #minorresult: this statement applies to a minor point that is not one of the paper's main claims.

Recommendation

• #recommend: you consider the paper worth reading for your work in the specified topic(s), e.g.:

  #spnetwork #rnaseq #recommend #pubmed12345
  

• #mustread: you consider the paper essential reading for your work in the specified topic(s), e.g.:

  #spnetwork #compbio #mustread #arxiv12345
  

Annotation of the paper's relation to other work

• #propose: paper proposes a hypothesis or model
• #seealso: other data relevant to this discussion
• #support: provides evidence for
• #prove: conclusive evidence for
• #contradict: provides evidence against
• #disprove: conclusive evidence against
• #analyze: analyzes or extends this hypothesis

Author actions

• #newpaper: invites the specified audience to read the paper; typically by its author. e.g.:

  #spnetwork #compbio #newpaper #arxiv12345
  

• #revision: announces a new, revised version of the paper

Phase 1: using SP Net tagging in existing social networks

• Many existing services such as Google+, Twitter, Reddit etc. support tagging and tag search. Users of these services can start using SP Net tagging, and can use tag searches to give basic "subscription" and "peer review" capabilities. If you already use one of these services, just start adding the spnetwork tags to your posts as outlined above.
• If you're trying to choose which service is best for this, I'd recommend Twitter. It's closest to the spnet vision.

Twitter

Twitter is the original home of general-purpose tagging and subscriptions, so it works well there:

• search on a specified combination of tags e.g.:

  #spnetwork #bioinformatics #recommend
  

  Unfortunately #spnet appears to be used already RE: a Sao Paulo football team; #spnetwork appears to be (mostly) unused.

• Click on People you follow to filter the results just to your subscriptions.

Google+

Google+ supports both "friends" (via its Circles feature) and general-purpose tagging. It's possible to perform a join on these two criteria, but this is not prominently featured. Here's how to do it:

• search for a specified set of tags (e.g. #spnetwork and #compbio);
• filter the results to just items coming from people in your circles.
• You can then save this search, so you can later view your latest "subscription" results by rerunning this saved search.

Example:

https://plus.google.com/s/%23spnetwork%20%23compbio

Reddit

Reddit allows you to "subscribe" to specific people and then view their posts in different areas.

• click on a username to see their posts / profile.
• click the Friend button to add them to your subscriptions.
• go to https://friends.reddit.com to see their latest posts.
• filter to a specific topic by running a search like reddit:bioinformatics and also click the checkbox "limit my search to /r/friends".

Problem: Reddit appears to be limited to a flat "category" space, without a general tagging capability. Puzzles:

• how to restrict this to spnet traffic? Mandating the creation of a separate subreddit for spnet traffic (e.g. spnetbioinformatics instead of bioinformatics) seems unhelpful. Instead, perhaps each post title should include the word spnet. Then a search would be something like:

  reddit:bioinformatics spnetwork
  

• hashtags don't seem to do anything in reddit. That is, searching for #foobar seems exactly the same as searching for foobar.

• perhaps we should mandate putting the spnet tags in parentheses at the end of the title, e.g. (spnet recommend arxiv12345).

Facebook

Facebook just doesn't seem to support tagging or tag searching. I don't see an easy way of implementing an spnet subscription within their existing website.

Phase 2: building a SP Net service layer on top of the internet

For the moment, let's refer to this as a "Uniform Publish & Subscribe Locator" (UPSL) service, which positions this as analogous to the URL as an essential public infrastructure standard.

• anyone can include these tags in any post, anywhere, e.g. a blog post, a tweet, a comment on a news site, a forum etc.
• the UPS service will automatically find and aggregate these posts (via the #spnet tag).
• many domains link posts to authenticated identities (accounts), e.g. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc.
• anyone can use UPS website to consolidate their different accounts into one identity.
• UPS website lets people browse the recommendation network, create subscriptions, view their subscription stream, make recommendations, comments, etc.
• UPS service provides standard interface (UPSL) to aggregated data: identities; topics; subscriptions. Other websites or software can use these services to create their own ways of browsing or searching the recommendations network. For example, you could create an Arxiv peer review site specialized for mathematics.

Goals

• free social networking from the "walled garden": an individual should be able to publish, or subscribe to others, without barriers of "service providers" getting in the way. Users should be able to employ a wide range of services, but refer to them in a uniform, integrated way.
• in particular, the intersection of WHO and WHAT and public subscription networks are an essential public good that require a public standard, not warring walled-gardens.
• standardize the basic operations of social networking in the same limited way that URLs standardized resource requests (e.g. #, GET, POST).
• provide a public standard on which a diverse ecology of useful specialized social networking services can grow and flourish, through "information federation" instead of the all-or-nothing dynamic of walled-garden monopolization.

Standard Operators

Do a few fundamental operations well and simply.

• identity federation: enable a user to aggregate their many outputs as a single identity, a stable, unique ID. Then all their publications on those different outputs aggregate into a single history and reference system.
• topic federation: enable users to tag all of their publications in different services in a single consistent way.
• subscription federation: enable users to subscribe to an intersection of WHO+WHAT, that works on top of all underlying services (i.e. it works on top of the federated publication space). If a user opts to subscribe "publicly"

Old Tag Ideas (deprecated)

• #share: forwards paper to others. Seems unnecessary; user can just "retweet" the original (#newpaper) post, with or without comments.
• #submit: invites the specified audience to read the document; typically by its author. e.g.:
• #falsepositive: the specified publication makes a claim that appears to be invalid.
• #falsenegative: the specified publication misses an important conclusion that appears to be valid.

Probably a bad idea to require two separate words for "criticism" and "level of confidence". Instead better to use single words that convey both ideas:

• #questionable: the evidence is not strong enough

• #groundless: no valid evidence for this claim

• #false: you're sure it's incorrect

• #inappropriate: the specified publication violates a specific basic guideline of the forum. e.g.:

  #spnetwork #msg12345 #inappropriate #adhominemattack
  

  (assuming that #adhominemattack designates a specific forum guideline).

• #iamauthor: you are an author of the paper.

• #correspondingauthor: you are the paper's principal representative.

• #isAuthor: annotate an author

• #isDOI: annotate its DOI

Adverbs

• #maybe: to raise a possibility, without asserting high probability.

• #probably: greater than 50%.

• #highconfidence: greater than 1-epsilon (field-dependent)

• #nodoubt: absolutely certain.

• #provisional: statement is conditional on resolution of one or more questions about the document.

• #bad: attaches blame to the statement, e.g.:

  #spnetwork #pubmed12345 #precedes #arxiv12345 #bad
  

  suggests that the later authors have either misappropriated results from the previous publication or mis-cited it.