The SciLink project: from document-centric to resource-oriented publications

The World Wide Web has changed the way of publishing and distributing scholarly results. However, scholarly publications are still organized linearly and point to supplemental or related information only by textual references or at most by hyperlinks embedded into PDF documents. They are stored in closed repositories and we can hardly access, navigate, and use scholarly resources the way we do it with other Web resources. The goal of the SciLink project is to analyze scholarly practices in certain pilot communities, to learn how scholars currently use Web resources in their publications, and to design tools that help scholars in aggregating and publishing the building blocks of their works in a way that integrates with the resource-oriented Architecture of the World Wide Web. In that way, we want to allow humans and machine agents to access and interact with scholarly resources just like with any other Web resource.