Interactive Publications and the Record of Science

A one-day Workshop with this title was held under the auspices of ICSTI, the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information, in Paris on 8 February 2010. The IUCr presented a demonstration of its recent work integrating molecular visualizations into journal articles as enhanced figures, and demonstrated how the important aspect of this type of presentation is that it provides the reader (and the peer reviewer) with full access to the structural data underpinning the article. IUCr journals link to data sets deposited with the journal itself, or deposited in the Protein Data Bank. There is some pressure to include raw diffraction images in the peer review process and in long-term accessible archives. Almost certainly such images would remain at synchrotron facilities or large-scale data centres, highlighting the need for robust archival strategies and infrastructures to identify and link together distributed data sets and their associated publications. The Workshop brought together organisations responsible for assigning data set identifiers and developing effective ways to cite such data, as well as a number of other publishers who faced similar challenges, both in incorporating interactivity routinely into their publishing activities, and in securing the long-term preservation of the essential elements of such interactivity. A summary report is available on the IUCr web site.