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Science 14 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5942, pp. 828 - 832
DOI: 10.1126/science.1157784
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Review

Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing

Allen H. Renear* and Carole L. Palmer

The revolution in scientific publishing that has been promised since the 1980s is about to take place. Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content. An observed recent increase in strategic reading in the online environment will soon be further intensified by two current trends: (i) the widespread use of digital indexing, retrieval, and navigation resources and (ii) the emergence within many scientific disciplines of interoperable ontologies. Accelerated and enhanced by reading tools that take advantage of ontologies, reading practices will become even more rapid and indirect, transforming the ways in which scientists engage the literature and shaping the evolution of scientific publishing.

Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: renear{at}illinois.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)