PubLink: A Toolset for Enriching Scholarly Digital Publications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tristan Weddigen
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 501142032

The humanities increasingly need and want to publish their research in Open Access in order to gain a wider, faster, and more sustainable dissemination of research results. However, the most common output of research as downloadable PDF does not really overcome the logics and limitations of print publications as it does not profit fully from linking data as to complete the full circle with digital resources which are, however, increasingly used for producing that very knowledge contained in the publications. The present project strives for freeing humanities research from the dead-end of PDF publications and making them more connected, visible, and sustainable. The project develops a workbench for the enrichment of journal articles and academic papers, which will be integrated into the OJS infrastructure. Three types of enrichment are to be distinguished: firstly, the linking of entities such as places, persons, and artworks. Secondly, the linking of cited literature with library catalogs so that works without DOI can also be clearly referenced. And thirdly, the embedding of links to image extracts and annotations on images. Texts enriched in this way can be better indexed by search engines and contribute to making the interconnectedness of different scientific disciplines more visible. Based on standards such as RDF, IIIF, TEI, and JATS, a working tool for enriching texts is being developed that can be used modularly and across disciplines. The backend of the OJS software will be extended by functionalities that will monitor the enrichment process and that will serve as an interchange to send the article to the existing tools that will be used for enrichment, e.g. SciFlow and TEI Publisher. In addition, a demonstrator application will be developed that harvests the enriched texts and showcases the cross-linking abilities between articles.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)