ScholarLynk is a desktop solution aiming to support researchers in building and maintaining 'reading lists' of resources in collaboration with other researchers. A reading list is defined as a grouping of heterogeneous resources, e.g., academic papers, web pages, local files, together with associated metadata, annotations, and associations.

The novelty of ScholarLynk is twofold: it provides a unified interface for managing desktop and web data sources and it supports a collaborative environment.

We are working on a prototype that offers tools for (i) constructing reading lists by tagging desired resources, (ii) seamlessly incorporating remote data sources as desktop resources, and (iii) supporting sharing of reading lists and collaboration with other users of the ScholarLynk.

The prototype implementation leverages the DRIVER Infrastructure for European Open Access publications that currently comprises over 3 million publication records from 287 repositories world wide. With respect to ScholarLynk, the DRIVER infrastructure offers: (i) integrated data sources by providing search facilities over DRIVER bibliographic metadata, and (ii) hosting of content and metadata from the users’ personal spaces and sharing of that data via authorized client applications.

We hope to make the prototype available for download in the near future. Our initial planned release date had to be delayed due to additional functional requirements.