All aboard: toward a machine-friendly scholarly communication system

his sentence, which we used for effect in numerous conference presentations and eventually fully articulated in a 2004 paper [1], is still by and large true. Although scholarly publishers have adopted new technologies that have made access to scholarly materials significantly easier (such as the Web and PDF documents), these changes have not realized the full potential of the new digital and networked reality. In particular , they do not address three shortcomings of the prevailing scholarly communication system: • Systemic BLOCKINissues, BLOCKINparticularly BLOCKINthe BLOCKINunbreakable BLOCKINtie BLOCKINin BLOCKINthe BLOCKINpubli-cation system between the act of making a scholarly claim and the peer-review process • Economic BLOCKINstrains BLOCKINthat BLOCKINare BLOCKINmanifested BLOCKINin BLOCKINthe BLOCKIN " serials BLOCKINcrisis, " which places tremendous burdens on libraries • Technical BLOCKINaspects BLOCKINthat BLOCKINpresent BLOCKINbarriers BLOCKINto BLOCKINan BLOCKINinteroperable information infrastructure We share these concerns about the state of scholarly communication with many others worldwide. Almost a decade ago, we " The current scholarly communication system is nothing but a scanned copy of the paper-based system. "