Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
'minutes of science' and there has to be a mechanism for taking
responsibility for version control in general and for the definitive version
of a work in particular.
Standards and interoperability
You may not think of standards as being very exciting; frankly,
standards are not very exciting, but they are very important. The
landscape of digital information is complex, and standards are needed
for integration and interoperability. Try to imagine a telephone system,
or indeed the internet itself, with no standards. It would be impossible,
as no distributed system could work.
Someone has to develop and maintain these standards and, like
everything else, this needs to be paid for.
Linking and the persistence of links
Thanks to CrossRef,
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hypertext linking between research articles is now
commonplace and readers have a new way of browsing the literature;
for the first time they can bounce from one article to the next. Linking
will become ever more pervasive and we are already seeing the
facilitating technology behind this linking functionality, the digital
object identifier (DOI), being assigned to book chapters, tables, charts,
datasets, video and other forms of content.
Through linking, the formal scholarly literature will become ever
more entwined with informal communication like blogs and wikis, and
here the ephemeral nature of the web will become an increasing issue.
Currently, links from reference lists usually benefit from brand
association with a journal or other publication, although links directly
out from the full text to a cited resource may not. But, as linking
becomes more widespread to encompass more types of information,
there will need to be mechanisms that will indicate the nature of the
cited resource and give the reader an indication of its provenance.
To sum up, the web will need a new service or group of services which
will assign authority to links, and also check that they are not broken.
