FAIR digital objects for academic publishers

Abstract

For 200 years, collective scholarly knowledge was advanced by reporting new findings in the form of narrative text that is rich in logic, pinned to data, hedged with cautious nuance, and yielding novel claims. Authors' narratives evolved over the years into the now familiar academic research article, whose form has radiated into thousands of specialized intellectual niches (i.e., journal titles). In the last decades the corpus of collective scholarly knowledge (both narrative text and published data) has come to exceed human comprehension and challenges the ability of researchers, even those working in narrowly defined disciplines, to keep up. As a response, a wide range of abstracting and indexing services emerged and were among the first to push toward “electronic” publishing. By now, articles are routinely made available in digital repositories, but still the content and the form remain bound to human readers while the powerful information processing capabilities of machines, which ought to assist the researcher, are marginalized to the mundane calculation of impact scores. Today, the long-form narrative and the lack of standards in the academic publishing industry make the bulk of this information notoriously difficult for the machine process and reuse in scientific applications. As such, the classical research article has become increasingly untenable as a meaningful unit of intellectual progress. Since 2016, the FAIR Principles have provided guidance on how to compose data, including information contained in narrative text, to make them machine actionable. Recent developments in FAIR Digital Objects are now being exploited in academic publishing to expose FAIR information at the source, avoiding cumbersome text mining, and making exact meaning available to machine assistants supporting human scholars. Here I describe some of these long-term developments and how they relate to a new Sage/IOS Press journal called FAIR Connect. These trends signal an inevitable movement towards the FAIRifcation of scholarship, and hint at key issues that will impact the practice and business of academic publishing.