More than a decade after the emergence of electronic journals, the Web-based scholarly communication system still strongly resembles its paper-based predecessor. The growing frustration with this status-quo is illustrated by three prominent events in 2011 alone aimed at bringing together thought leaders to reflect on an improved scholarly communication system that better leverages the technical and social capabilities offered by the networked environment: the Beyond the PDF meeting, the Dagstuhl Workshop on the Future of Research Communication , and the Microsoft Research Transforming Scholarly Communication Workshop . Meanwhile, glimpses of eminent changes can already be observed, including the emergence of a machine-actionable layer of scholarly communication in which semantic technologies play a significant role and the growing interest in "papers" that are more tightly integrated in the scholarly process and environment. Examples of these changes can mostly be characterized as experimental, and their eventual deployment may still take years. Meanwhile, there remain plenty of opportunities to introduce straightforward improvements aimed at better aligning scholarly communication with established Web practices.
