The goal of the Digital Infrastructures for Scholarly Content Objects (DISCO2021) workshop at JCDL 2021 is to raise awareness of quality issues and re-use challenges in digital infrastructures for scholarly content, and collect potential solutions among an audience of diverse expertise. The workshop will have two sessions.
As digital libraries make the dissemination of research publications easier, they also enable the propagation of invalid or unreliable knowledge. Examples of relevant problems include: retraction and unknowing/unintentional citation and reuse of retracted papers; propagation of errors in literature and scientific databases; non-reproducible papers; known domain-specific issues such as cell line contamination; bias in research datasets and publications; systematic reviews that come up with different conclusions for the same problem at the same time. In the digital environment, which facilitates broad interdisciplinary reuse beyond the originating scientific community, marking known problems and tracing the impact on dependent and follow-on works is an important, but under-addressed problem. Further, context-specific information inside a paper may not be immediately reusable when extracted by automated processes, leading to apparent contradictions. Current mitigating approaches use the underlying reasoning for information retrieval, develop new infrastructures analyzing the reasoning or certainty of statements, or use visualization to highlight possible discrepancies.
DISCO’s expected audience includes digital publishing and digital library practitioners and researchers. The workshop may be of particular interest to researchers in semantic publishing, information quality, provenance, trust, workflows, text mining, database curation, and knowledge graphs. Users of digital infrastructures may also contribute, particularly domain researchers in evidence synthesis communities, innovators in open science, robustness and reproducibility, and those helping researchers organize, find, and use scholary literature.