Directions for hypertext research: exploring the design space for interactive scholarly communication

This paper is a "call to arms" for the community to take up Van Bush's original challenge of effecting a transformation of scholarly communications and record keeping. It argues for the necessity of an interactive scholarly communication research agenda by briefly reviewing the rapid development of alternative authoring and publishing models. Seven dimensions of interactive communication that delineate a design space for the area are described. Previous work and existing new media are used to initially populate the design space and show opportunities for new research directions. VKB spaces, Synchrony PADLs, and Walden's paths are used as foils for describing new media for interactive scholarly communication. This leads to a brief discussion of uncovered areas in the design space and open research questions. A community developed framework for future interactive scholarly communications would be a major contribution and is put forth as the overall goal.