Semantic publishing offers the promise of computable papers, enriched visualisation and a realisation of the linked data ideal. [...] It promises a realisation of the vision of a next generation of the web, with papers becoming a critical part of a linked data environment [1,4], where the results and narratives become one. [...] As well as delivering content, we are also using this framework to investigate semantic academic publishing, investigating how we can enhance the machine interpretability of the final paper, while living within the key constraint of making life (slightly) better for machine, author and reader without adding complexity for the human participants. Primarily here, we are interested only in the machine that mediate either the authoring or reading process; however, increased interpretability for these machines should also benefit others, including for instance those of librarians or publishers. [...] To move towards semantic publishing in kblog, we have tried to put in place an approach that gives benefit to readers, authors and computational interpretation. As a result, at this stage, we have light semantic publishing, with small but definite benefits for all.

Our key constraint is the desire to add value for all the human participants. Both authors and readers should see and recognise additional value, with the semantics a useful or necessary byproduct of the process, rather than the primary motivation. [...] ..we have followed a strong principle of semantic enhancement that offers advantages to both reader and author immediately. Hence, adding references as a DOI, or other identifier, “automagically” produces an in-text citation and a nicely formatted reference list. The reference list is no longer present in the article but is a visualisation over linked data. A happy by-product is that the article itself becomes a first class citizen of this linked data environment. [...] ... advantages may be indirect; richer reader semantics may attract more readers and thus more citations—which the authors appreciate as much as the act of publishing itself. It is, however, difficult to imagine how such advantages can be conveyed to the author at the point of writing. It is easy to see the advantages of semantic publishing for readers, but as a community, we need to pay attention to advantages to the authors too. Without these “carrots”, we will only have “sticks”—and authors, particularly technically skilled ones, are highly adept at working around the sticks.