Scientific research communication: the promise and current realities of enhanced publications

Smith, MacKenzie
Scientific research communication: the promise and current realities of enhanced publications (pdf 5pp)
Commons of Science Conference, Washington, D.C., October 3-4, 2006

Opening paragraph: "There has been an upsurge of interest from the scientific community in the creation of “enhanced publications” – Web-accessible networks of resources related to scientific research publications. Peer-reviewed journal articles (and their close cousins, white papers and technical reports) are still the gold standard for communicating the results of scientific research and experimentation, but in this age of digital Web publishing neither authors nor their readers still find them entirely sufficient. Advances in publishing technology are raising expectations: readers want interactive user interfaces for visualizing results, searching and browsing tools, collaboration tools, and linkages between text, multimedia, data, and tools to work with all of the above."

Comment: Smith places the locus for these advances between repositories and publishers: "we begin to see ways in which research articles (published or unpublished) can evolve into networks of information about the research they describe by implementing standard means of interoperation between content repositories (e.g. library-run DSpace (plug!) archives and publishers content management systems) and between types of content in them (e.g. research papers and related datasets)." Thus the paper describes the principle but does not provide any examples of the practice. The best example of the practice in development is the eBank UK project (which uses EPrints (plug!)).