Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication

Abstract:  The future of scholarly communication involves research results, analysis and data all being produced, published, verified and reused interactively on the Web, with ‘papers’ linking to and from each other at a granular level. The academic process of peer review is increasingly becoming open, transparent and decentralised. More broadly, the mechanism for global knowledge sharing is becoming an ongoing conversation between experts, policy makers, implementers, and the general public. This vision is radical, and getting there requires understanding of, and change in, a number of interrelated areas. In this article we break down the problem space and define requirements for advancement towards a Web-based ecosystem for scholarly communication: Linked Research. We discuss our strategy for tackling each of these areas. This includes how we can build on and combine existing well-known technologies and practices for digital publishing, social interactions, decentralised data storage, and semantic data enrichment. We provide an initial assessment of our proposed strategy through an example implementation of tooling which sets out to meet the requirements.