Enhanced publications or enhanced ebooks are a form of electronic publishing for the dissemination and sharing of research outcomes, whose first formal definition can be tracked back to 2009. [1] As many forms of digital publications, they typically feature a unique identifier (possibly a persistent identifier) and descriptive metadata information. Unlike traditional digital publications (e.g. PDF article), enhanced publications are often tailored to serve specific scientific domains and are generally constituted by a set of interconnected parts corresponding to research assets of several kinds (e.g. datasets, videos, images, stylesheets, services, workflows, databases, presentations) and to textual descriptions of the research (e.g. papers, chapters, sections, tables). The nature and format of such parts and of the relationships between them, depends on the application domain and may largely vary from case to case. [2]
The main motivations behind enhanced publications are to be found in the limitations of traditional scientific literature to describe the whole context and outcome of a research activity. Their goal is to move "beyond the simple PDF" (FORCE11 initiative [3] ) and support scientists with advanced ICT tools for sharing their research more comprehensively, without losing the narrative spirit of "the publication" as dissemination means. This trend is confirmed by the several enhanced publication systems devised in the literature, offering to research communities one or more of the following functionalities: Packaging of related research assets; Web 2.0 reading capabilities; Interlinking research outputs; Re-production and assessment of scientific experiments.
The first enhancement introduced to move beyond the mare digitization of the publication and investigate new avenues in the digital scholarly communication was likely accompanying a digital publication (e.g. PDF file) with supplementary material. In such scenarios, scientists can share packages consisting of publication and supplementary material in an attempt to better deliver hypothesis and results of the research presented in the publication.
Enhanced Publication system | References |
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ReadCube Enhanced PDF | ReadCube Papers Supplementary viewing optons, [4] Wiley Journals: What is ReadCube [5] |
Journals with supplementary material policies | Elsevier Supplementary Data policies, [6] SAGE Journals: Author Guide to Supplementary Files [7] |
Modular Article | Kircz, Joost G. (2002) [8] |
LORE | Gerber, A., & Hunter, J. (2010) [9] |
This category of approaches focuses on enhanced publication data models whose parts, metadata and relationships are defined with the purpose of improving the end-user experience when visualizing and discovering research materials. These approaches are the natural extension of the traditional publication, oriented to reading, and typically integrate all tools made available by the web infrastructure and its data sources. [10] Specifically, they explore the possibilities of:
Enhanced Publication system | References |
---|---|
ReadCube Enhanced PDF | Wiley Journals: What is ReadCube [5] |
D4Science Live documents | Candela, L., Castelli, D., Pagano P., & Simi, M. (2005) [11] |
SciVee | Fink & Bourne (2007) [12] |
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases | Shotton, Portwin, Klyne, & Miles (2009) [13] |
The Veteran Tapes Project | van den Heuvel, van Horik, Sanders, Scagliola, & Witkamp (2010) [14] |
Utopia Documents | Attwood, T. K., Kell, D. B., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S. R., & Thorne, D. (2010) [15] |
Rich Internet Publications | Breure, Voorbij, & Hoogerwerf (2011) [16] |
SOLE | Pham, Malik, Foster, Di Lauro, & Montella (2012) [17] |
Elsevier's Article of the Future | Aalbersberg, I. J., Heeman, F., Koers, H., & Zudilova-Seinstra, E. (2012) [18] |
Bookshelf | Hoeppner (2013) [19] |
Scientific communities, organizations, and funding agencies supports initiatives, standards and best practices for publishing and citing datasets and publications on the web. [20] [21] Examples are DataCite, [22] EPIC [23] and CrossRef, [24] which establish common best practices to assign metadata information and persistent identifiers to datasets and publications. Data publishing and citation practices are advocated by research communities that believe that datasets should be discoverable and reusable in order to improve the scientific activity. [25] [26] On this respect, several enhanced publication information systems were built to offer the possibility to enrich a publication with links to relevant research data, possibly deposited in data repositories or discipline specific databases. The existence of links between literature and data support the discovery of used and produced scientific data, strengthen data citation, facilitate data re-use, and reward the precious work underlying data management procedures.
Enhanced Publication system | References |
---|---|
ReadCube Enhanced PDF | Fenton (2016) [27] |
SCOPE | Cheung, Hunter, Lashtabeg, & Drennan (2008) [28] |
CENS ORE Aggregations | Pepe, Mayernik, Borgman and Van de Sompel (2009) [29] |
europePMC | McEntyre et al. (2011) [30] |
WormBase | Yook et al. (2012) [31] |
DANS Enhanced Publication Project | Farace, Frantzen, Stock, Sesink, & Rabina (2012) [32] |
BioTea | Garcia et al. (2013) [33] |
OpenAIRE multi-disciplinary Enhanced Publications | Hoogerwerf et al. (2013) [34] |
Scientists should be equipped with the facilities necessary to repeat or reproduce somebody else's experiment. In enhanced publications with executable parts, narrative parts are accompanied by executable workflows with the purpose of reproducing and repeating experiments.
Enhanced Publication system | References |
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Scientific Model Packages | Hunter (2006a), [35] Hunter (2006b), [36] Hunter & Cheung (2007) [37] |
MyExperiment (Research Objects) | De Roure et al. (2009); [38] Bechhofer, Soure, Gamble, Goble, & Buchan (2010) [39] |
IODA | Siciarek and Wiszniewski (2011) [40] |
Paper Mâché | Brammer, Crosby, Matthews, & Williams (2011) [41] |
Collage Authoring Environment | Nowakowski et al. (2011) [42] |
SciCrunch's RRIDs | Jeffrey et al. (2014) [43] |
SHARE | Van Gorp & Mazanek (2011) [44] |
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Scientometrics is the field of study which concerns itself with measuring and analysing scholarly literature. Scientometrics is a sub-field of informetrics. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that over-reliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.
Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.
The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.
Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
Jason Swedlow is an American-born cell biologist and light microscopist who is Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Scotland. He is a co-founder of the Open Microscopy Environment and Glencoe Software. In 2021, he joined Wellcome Leap as a Program Director.
Carole Anne Goble, is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Norman Paton.
Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and Data Science. As of 2009, he is co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program.
Galaxy is a scientific workflow, data integration, and data and analysis persistence and publishing platform that aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming or systems administration experience. Although it was initially developed for genomics research, it is largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system.
Plazi is a Swiss-based international non-profit association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital bio-taxonomic literature. Plazi is cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and is maintaining this digital taxonomic literature repository at Zenodo to provide access to FAIR data converted from taxonomic publications using the TreatmentBank service, enhances submitted taxonomic treatments by creating a version in the XML format Taxpub, and educates about the importance of maintaining open access to scientific discourse and data. It is a contributor to the evolving e-taxonomy in the field of Biodiversity Informatics.
Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.
Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.
Research networking (RN) is about using tools to identify, locate and use research and scholarly information about people and resources. Research networking tools serve as knowledge management systems for the research enterprise. RN tools connect institution-level/enterprise systems, national research networks, publicly available research data, and restricted/proprietary data by harvesting information from disparate sources into compiled profiles for faculty, investigators, scholars, clinicians, community partners and facilities. RN tools facilitate collaboration and team science to address research challenges through the rapid discovery and recommendation of researchers, expertise and resources.
Islandora is a free and open-source software digital repository system based on Drupal and integrating with additional applications, including Fedora Commons. It is open source software. Islandora was originally developed at the University of Prince Edward Island by the Robertson Library and is now maintained by the Islandora Foundation, which has a mission to, "promote collaboration through transparency and consensus building among Islandora community members, and to steward their shared vision for digital curation features through a body of software and knowledge."
In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web. The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared using a single identifier. As such, research objects are an advanced form of Enhanced publication.
Data publishing is the act of releasing research data in published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.
Pensoft Publishers are a publisher of scientific literature based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pensoft was founded in 1992, by two academics: Lyubomir Penev and Sergei Golovatch. It has published over 1000 academic and professional books and currently publishes over 60 peer-reviewed open access scientific journals including ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, Check List, Comparative Cytogenetics, Journal of Hymenoptera Research, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, and Zoosystematics and Evolution.
FORCE11 is an international coalition of researchers, librarians, publishers and research funders working to reform or enhance the research publishing and communication system. Initiated in 2011 as a community of interest on scholarly communication, FORCE11 is a registered 501(c)(3) organization based in the United States but with members and partners around the world. Key activities include an annual conference, the Scholarly Communications Institute and a range of working groups.
Karthik Ram is a research scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and member of the Initiative for Global Change Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for being the co-founder of rOpenSci. Ram's work focuses on global change, data science, and open research software.