Ousting ivory tower research: towards a web framework for providing experiments as a service.

With its close ties to the Web, the IR community is destined to leverage the dissemination and collaboration capabilities that the Web provides today. Especially with the advent of the software as a service principle, an IR community is conceivable that publishes experiments executable by anyone over the Web. A review of recent SIGIR papers shows that we are far away from this vision of collaboration. The benefits of publishing IR experiments as a service are striking for the community as a whole, and include potential to boost research profiles and reputation. However, the additional work must be kept to a minimum and sensitive data must be kept private for this paradigm to become an accepted practice. To foster experiments as a service in IR, we present a Web framework for experiments that addresses the outlined challenges and possesses a unique set of compelling features in comparison to existing solutions. We also describe how our reference implementation is already used officially as an evaluation platform for an established international plagiarism detection competition.