Scientific research is embracing highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive standards of practice. As scientific research transforms itself, the need for a natively digital, network-based scholarly communication system that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time becomes evident. The ubiquity of the Internet provides the foundation for a new publication paradigm that is inclusive, responsive, and adaptive, one that resembles the scientific process that it intends to document. The Pathways project will investigate and prototype new infrastructure to address the following requirements. First, the unit of scholarly communication (traditionally a publication.) must be redefined to resemble the reality of science itself by integrating text, data simulations, images, audio, and other rich media. Second, the process of science is as important as the product. Networked infrastructure permits the decoupling and reimplementation of functions that have been vertically-integrated in traditional publishing systems. New information flows, or pathways, must be enabled to support a broad spectrum of functions including data sharing, dissemination of results, peer-review, and digital preservation. Third, information about the dynamics of scholarship is currently lost. The scholarly communication infrastructure should facilitate an archival view of scientific progress, whereby final results are but one record in the documentation of process. A graph-based information model will provide a layer of abstraction over heterogeneous resources (data, content, and services). A service-oriented process model will enable the expression and invocation of multi-stage compositional, computational, and transformational information flows.
An interoperable, network-based system will assist in breaking the constraining shackles of the traditional scholarly publishing paradigm, allowing for flexible and efficient mechanisms to create, disseminate, certify, register, transform, and archive scientific results. The models and protocols developed in this work will facilitate the creation of new types of information entities and the evolution of distributed workflows that better match underlying scientific processes. Just as the Web created a tool for all,scholars, teachers, lay citizens and school children, a better connected scholarly communication system will enable the wide dissemination of scientific results as rich, multi-dimensional, dynamic online resources.
