A Multi-Relational Network to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

The general purpose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. At a finer granularity, there exists multiple stages which, when confronted by a member of the community, have different requirements and therefore different solutions. In order to take a researcher's idea from an initial inspiration to a community resource, the scholarly communication infrastructure may be required to 1) provide a scientist initial seed ideas; 2) form a team of well suited collaborators; 3) locate the best venue to publish the formalized idea; 4) determine the most appropriate peers to review the manuscript; and 5) disseminate the end product to the most interested members of the community. Through the various delineations of this process, the requirements of each stage are tied solely to the multifunctional resources of the community: its researchers, its journals, and its manuscripts. It is within the collection of these resources and their inherent relationships that the solutions to the stages of scholarly communication are to be found. This paper describes a multi-relational network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process