Transforming a research paper into a rich internet publication

Scientific communication is gradually changing. In the web era the genre of the printed paper has survived in digital format as static PDF, but annotations, multimedia and access to data are appearing as new interactive features of innovative scholarly journals. Together they justify the term Rich Internet Publication (RIP) as name for a new emerging genre. Because of the authoritative role of publications in highly ranked journals, a RIP is mostly used as a ‘showcase’ to publish supplementary material that could not be made available otherwise, and to generate a broader interest in a project. The traditional authoring of linear text does not adequately fit the new situation, in which the author has to deal with much more information in various formats and has access to new options for presentation. This paper describes a strategy to transform a regular paper into a RIP. The strategy is divided into a conceptual stage, in which focal points are created and a balanced mixture of different media are achieved divided over different levels, and the implementation.