Social Shaping of Digital Publishing: Exploring the interplay between Culture and Technology

Since the advent of the Web the processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing. The Open Access movement has been a major driver of change in recent years in regard to scholarly communication. However, on other fields of application, such as e-government or e-learning, the changes are also evident. These are, in most cases, driven by technological advances, but there are many cases where social reality change pushes technology development. The social and the mobile Web and linked data are currently shaping the edge of research on digital publishing. Liquid publishing is on the more daring agendas. Digital Preservation is an issue that poses great challenges, still far from solved. The legal issues, security and trust continue to deserve our full attention. We need new visualization techniques and Innovative Interfaces that keep pace with the global dimension of information. This is the current scenario, but what will follow? What technologies and social and communication paradigms will we be discussing in ten or twenty years?

Elpub 2012 will be focusing on the social shaping of digital publishing by exploring the interplay between culture and technology. It is fitting that we are hosting the conference in the European Capital of Culture for 2012, Guimarães.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to these seven main areas:

1 - Digital Scholarship, Open Access and Open Science

Concepts, models and innovative applications in the field of scholarly communication. Results of recent studies on current practices. New tools and / or results of studies of their applicability. Positioning on new trends.

2 –Interoperability and the Intelligent Web

Concepts, models and innovative applications that are based on the paradigms of the Semantic Web. Metadata, linked data and open linked data, text mining, traceability, scalability, rules, inference and agents on open environments. Cloud computing and related applications, services and studies. Demonstration applications. Results of field studies and software applications.

3 – The Social and Mobile Web

Concepts, models and innovative applications for the social Web and for the mobile Web. Challenges and achievements of electronic publishing in mobile environments. Context-aware pervasive systems. Geo-location and electronic publication. Information retrieval. The social Web in mobile environments. Results of field studies and software applications.

4 – The legal, secure and trustful Web

Copyright and legal issues. Convergence, divergence and relationships between existing copyright models. Machine-readable information and interoperability on copyright. Authentication. Security and privacy on publishing and in cloud computing. Theoretical models or tools to ensure the reliability of sources. Results of field studies and software applications.

5 – Innovative interfaces, interaction and visualization

New models of interfaces for electronic publication. New interfaces for impaired people. Models and visualization applications for Web 3.0 and 4.0 and for cloud computing. Results of field studies and software applications.

6 – Failures and learnings

Papers that report experimentations that did not work and lessons learned from those failures.

7 – The future of Digital Publishing

Position papers with new insights for the future. New scholarly constructs and discourse methods. Innovative business models for electronic publishing. New technological paradigms for electronic publishing.

Contributions are invited for the following categories:

  • Research papers (up to 10 pages; please use the template in the conference web site)
  • Posters (up to 3 pages.
  • Extended abstracts (a minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1,500 words; please specify it as “extended abstract” using the template)