Microsoft Research has just published a new free ebook, The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Part Four, titled “Scholarly Communication” is the most interesting for non-scientists…

* Jim Gray’s fourth paradigm and the construction of the scientific record – Clifford Lynch

* Text in a data-centric world – Paul Ginsparg

* All aboard: toward a machine-friendly scholarly communication system – Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze

* The future of data policy – Anne Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, Kylie Pappalardo

* I have seen the paradigm shift, and it is us – John Wilbanks

* From web 2.0 to the global database – Timo Hannay