International Journal on Digital Libraries
Special Issue on: The Changing Role of Scientific Digital Libraries in the Big Data Era

Manuscripts submission due date: September 30, 2021

Three convergent factors, i.e., the scientific, the technological, and the political factors, have contributed to deeply change the scientific context within which research activities are carried out. The scientific factor consists in the emergence of a new (fourth) paradigm of science-based on data-intensive computing (Data Science). The technological factor consists in the emergence of new technologies in data seeking, as the huge volumes of research data have outgrown the capabilities of conventional query processing technology. The political factor consists of a new policy platform that prescribes the open sharing of all research outcomes as early as is practical in the discovery process (Open Science).
In such a new scientific context, the role of Scientific Digital Libraries is destined to profoundly change. We envision a Scientific Digital Library as an Open Cyberscholarly Communication Infrastructure that will act as:

* enabler of an open, evolvable, and extensible scholarly communication ecosystem
* enabler of linked scholarly records
* facilitator of scientific information exploration
* enabler of scientific information discovery
* facilitator of research dynamic analysis

In this new role, the Scientific Digital Library has to provide the following essential services:
* linking services to allow the creation of linked information spaces
* intermediary services to make the holdings of DLs, DCs, etc. findable, accessible, interoperable, and (re) usable
* navigational services to allow scholars to navigate the linked scientific information space
* scholarly workflow services that draw reading and learning patterns within the linked scholarly record
* semantic services that allow scholars to discover and access relevant scientific information and conduct effective scholarly inquiries

In this Special Issue, we invite authors to present research results that can make feasible the implementation of the new Scientific Digital Library.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* interlinking technologies
* semantic technologies
* data citation technologies
* new paradigms of information seeking
* extensive use of ontologies
* discovery across multiple repositories
* network-centric publication models
* semantically enriched metadata

Guest editors:
* Costantino Thanos, Institute for Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR)

Co-guest editors:
* Edward A. Fox, Virginia Tech University
* Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen

Important Dates:
* Paper Submission deadline: September 30, 2021
* First notification: January 15, 2022
* Revision submission: March 15, 2022
* Second notification: April 15, 2022
* Final version submission: May 15, 2022