Report on enhanced publications state-of-the-art

This report provides an overview of the current status of enhanced publications in publishing and repository environments. We define an enhanced publication as a publication that is enhanced with three categories of information: (1) research data (evidence of the research), (2) extra materials (to illustrate or clarify), or (3) post-publication data (commentaries, ranking). We have found that even though publishers and repositories have the building blocks and tools available, they generally do not use them to create an enhanced publication for all three categories. Instead, (1) publishers offer only one or two of these categories with their publications; (2) publishers publish extra materials (such as movies) separately from the publication, without even a link between these related objects; (3) the option to add post-publication data is rarely supported by publishers; in contrast, (4) many repositories offer the options of linking publication and research data, adding commentaries, rankings, trackbacks, etc. Only one publisher, PLoS, provides all three enhancement services for their publications. The need for enhanced publications that are embedded in the publisher or repository environment is urgent, as the number of digital scholarly objects on the internet (such as multimedia materials, data sets, and blogs) is growing enormously. Without such an environment, it is difficult to discover whether related objects (such as movies, images, data sets and commentaries) are available.