Abstract
The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered. However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results. This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?
Highlights
Until the end of the last century, the role of technology in formal scientific communication was not any different from the role of technology in any other type of communication
We present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results
When photos and colour got introduced in print, these found their way into the scientific article
Summary
Until the end of the last century, the role of technology in formal scientific communication was not any different from the role of technology in any other type of (print) communication. Whereas science started to use digital tools for recording, processing, and storing the actual scientific findings and results, scientific publishing applied digital and web tools for the easier and faster discovery and dissemination of scientific information (achieved through the introduction of online submission systems, the internal use of SGML and XML, the adoption of PDF, the creation of journal web sites, and the implementation of text-search engines) Despite all these technological developments in scientific publishing, as far as the scientific content was concerned, the scientific article stayed very close to the (same old) print version (though distributed in a new electronic format, the PDF). Bridging the gap between the traditional print-based one-size-fits-all scientific article and today’s reality of discipline-specific digital science has been the objective of quite a number of studies, prototypes, and publication efforts (Journal of Archaeology, 2009; Shotton, Portwin, Klyne, & Miles, 2009) In this same context, Elsevier initiated the Article of the Future project (Aalbersberg, Heeman, Koers, & Zudilova-Seinstra, 2012), with the following objectives:. We end the paper with some conclusions and outlooks on future developments, in which scientific data and results get even more deeply integrated into the scientific article ... of the future
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