ESWC 2024 welcomes research articles employing the Open Web Platform. This document provides guidance to authors who wish to make their contributions available in HTML and related technology stack.
General Guidance
Contributions in HTML should be shared in EasyChair as a ZIP archive that contains the complete and self-contained content of the article. It should include a main “index.html” and all used resources (like media, scripts) to guarantee a correct visualization of the document on common desktop and mobile Web browsers. Please note the following key requirements:
- HTML template: any tooling or process can be used to produce the HTML.
- Content: the full content of the article must be human-readable with HTML alone. The use of CSS and JavaScript is encouraged, but should not interfere with the accessibility of the content.
- Offline-friendly: there must not be any external dependencies (e.g., a network connection) to retrieve, to render, or to manipulate the content of the article.
- Privacy: scripts must not be used to identify or track readers.
- View: the rendered article (HTML+CSS) should have the “look and feel” of the LNCS authoring guidelines. Pixel-perfection is not expected. This is to ensure visual consistency of the proceedings as well as to have comparative page limits with the print-based publication. The HTML article has to be compliant with the page limit constraint.
It should be possible to read the HTML contributions on an average desktop computer or mobile computer that is equipped with a reasonably current, Javascript-enabled Web browser (e.g., Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Internet Explorer, Brave, Safari). We encourage authors to make their articles as accessible as possible (for reading and interacting) because different consumers (in this case initially the reviewers and chairs) may have different environments and abilities.
Final (“camera-ready”) version
Formatting requirements for the final version differ by call.
- Articles accepted in the Research, In-Use, and Resources tracks will be published by Springer in the printed conference proceedings, as a part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Springer requires the sources of articles that have been accepted for publication in LaTeX or Word format. If an article submitted in HTML is accepted, the authors can choose to do this step manually or using tool support as outlined below.
- Articles accepted in the Posters & Demos track and in the Doctoral Consortium will be published as CEUR-WS.org proceedings volumes. CEUR-WS.org allows articles to be in HTML but, for guaranteed printability and archiving, requires an additional PDF, which should be a print-out of the HTML article in the LNCS layout.
- Articles accepted in the Industry track will be published on the conference website. The same “HTML+PDF” rule applies as explained above for posters, demos and doctoral papers.
Recommendations
We recommend that authors take the following steps independently of the general process:
Before sharing your article with ESWC, self-publish your HTML version, eg. at a repository, personal or institution website that’s publicly accessible and archivable from a URL.
Include the URL of your self-published article along the lines of: “Identifier: http://example.org/article “ after the list of authors and/or include the URL in the abstract of your article. Make sure to preserve this information in your camera-ready version.
Consider using a Creative Commons license like CC BY 4.0 on the self-published version.
Create multiple archived copies of the self-published version using on-demand free archive services like archive.org, archive.is.
If you intend to also publish the “Author’s Accepted Manuscript” version following peer-review, note Springer’s self-archiving policy.
Send a notification about your original self-published article to the Linked Open Research Cloud (LORC) to improve the discoverability of your article.
For additional help, authors are welcome to join the public chat on Linked Research. Please note that this not an official communication channel of the conference. It is an open community for scholarly communication and people passionate about the Web.
Authors are encouraged to use tooling and processes that work best for them.
dokieli
dokieli is a client-side editor for decentralized article publishing in HTML+RDF annotations, notifications, and social interactions. It implements W3C Recommendations like Web Annotation, Linked Data Notifications, and ActivityPub.
The LNCS author guidelines can be used as template (ZIP package as expected for the submission). There is a list of examples in the wild.
Authors that would like to self-publish can use any HTTP server. Authors, reviewers, and readers can use their own WebID and Linked Data based personal storages, eg. Solid, with dokieli. Join the chat if you need help.
RASH
The Research Articles in Simplified HTML (RASH) format allows one to easily prepare a scientific paper in HTML format (example: online, ZIP package as expected for the submission). It is composed by a few of the available HTML tags and allows one to add RDF annotations by means of Turtle, JSON-LD, RDF/XML, and RDFa.
Although one could directly write the HTML/RASH syntax (see documentation), one can create an Open Office Writer (ODT) or Microsoft Word (DOCX) document, and then convert it to HTML/RASH using an online tool: rocs. In summary:
- Prepare your article in Open Office Writer (ODT) or Microsoft Word (DOCX), following the simple RASH guidelines for ODT and DOCX.
- Use ROCS, the RASH online conversion service to convert your ODT or DOCX document to RASH. This tool will produce a ZIP file with the RASH conversion of your paper (it also includes an LNCS-conforming LaTeX version of the article). This ZIP file can be directly submitted to EasyChair. If you prefer, you could also install the conversion tool locally on your machine.
- Optionally, if you want to extend the metadata of the paper, add RDF annotations to the HTML code.
If you choose to write HTML/RASH manually (which makes sense when collaborating with your co-authors in a source code repository), note that the above-mentioned ROCS can actually convert any RASH markup to LaTeX.
ScholarMarkdown
ScholarMarkdown is framework for writing articles in the lightweight Markdown syntax, with automatic translation into HTML+RDFa, and the option to output PDF. It provides syntactic sugar to easily perform common tasks such as citing articles, writing math equations, and more.
Note: ScholarMarkdown requires Ruby to be installed.
The Markdown-based source files enables straightforward versioning and collaborative editing with version-control systems such as git, and integrates nicely with automated self-publishing via solutions such as GitHub pages, as demonstrated by the examples in the wild.
To get started, follow the quick start guide, which will provide you with the the required LNCS template in Markdown (Example of the initial template). After compiling your Markdown files to HTML, an output/ directory will be created (Example of the compiled template). This output/ folder contains a standalone version of your article in HTML, and this is the folder that must be submitted on EasyChair. Further details on ScholarMarkdown can be found on the wiki.
Acknowledgements
Adapted from the ISWC 2021 HTML Submission Guide. We would like to thank Sarven Capadisli for his valuable contributions to these guidelines.