The talk is directed at an audience of people who think about journals from the publishing side of the business, but I think it will be of interest to a wider audience as well. The presentation and synced audio can be viewed at Myplick.

Just to spoil the suspense, my predictions for the near future were:

1. The future is (already) online
2. Publishing will move closer to the communities it serves
3. New evaluation methods will evolve
4. Publishers will provide new ‘bells and whistles’
5. Data will become increasingly important and may start to supplant primary publications
6. New tools will affect us in unknown ways

Imagine the delight of the PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases team when they learned that Dr David Shotton, and his team from Oxford University had invested the effort to enrich the content of one of their journal articles, the results of which can be seen online here.

The enhanced version includes features like highlighted tagging which you can turn on or off (tagged terms include disease names, organisms, places, people, taxa), citations which include a pop-up containing the relevant quotation from the cited article, document and study summaries, tag clouds and citation analysis.

With a single click you can re-arrange the reference list by number of times each paper is cited, or add in the authors’ analysis of how the reference is used in the paper (obtains background from, confirms, extends, shares authors with, uses method in). The group has also provided interactive versions of some of the figures: compare the original, static Figure 3 to the moveable, overlaying, enhanced version.

David Shotton’s group hopes that this largely manual effort will demonstrate what practical enhancements can be made to scientific papers through the application of existing technology. Once the methods employed by Dr Shotton and his colleagues become more routine, all open-access literature could be semantically enhanced and redistributed without restriction.

Whether the next steps towards semantic markup are implemented by authors, publishers or post-publication text miners remains to be seen, but we welcome your feedback on this idea. Should you be interested in how this was done, a Review article published 4.17.2009 in PLoS Computational Biology describes the process in more detail.

This post with thanks to Shabnam Sigman, Publication Manager, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and Evie Browne, Publication Manager, PLoS Computational Biology.