Introduction to the special issue on digital scholarship - Springer

Use the link to access the full text article published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries.  "Digital scholarship, or 'cyberscholarship'—that based on data and computation—is radically reshaping knowledge discovery, creation, analysis, presentation and dissemination in many scholarly domains. Distinguishing features of digital scholarship are multi-stage workflows that often involve cross-disciplinary collaborations, use of a large variety of information objects from multiple sources, new research methodologies, innovative data analytics and multiple forms of presentation of research outcomes. The enabling environment for digital scholarship is a rapidly expanding global digital ecology composed of richly annotated datasets, open source tools and a growing appreciation of open access digital publication of text and data as a measure and driver of scholarly productivity. This special issue contains papers that report on research related to the broad set of activities that enable digital scholarship. For digital scholarship to flourish, consideration must be given to the entire data lifecycle. The digital libraries community has laid the foundation for digital scholarship by developing information environments and resources and by exploring new interdisciplinary problem domains. As large volumes of 'born digital' data are created and legacy collections are converted to digital form, new possibilities for scholarly work appear. To the degree that repositories can be interlinked at the data element level, interoperability and functionality is greatly increased. The result is knowledge infrastuctures capable of supporting a broad spectrum of scholarly activities. Semantic web and linked open data activities are developing standards, protocols and best practices for achieving this. Michael Lesk’s introduction to the Issue offers a rich historic perspective on digital libraries research and digital scholarship. He reminds us that the current information environment is a result of the efforts of many people from many kinds of organizations. Often they were focused on different goals. What is seen as essential is the communication of ideas and this we must continue to value and improve through new models of scholarly communication. The special issue contains six papers that describe work that describe outstanding examples of contemporary digital scholarship. They are ..."