The Time for Open and Interoperable Annotation is Now

Annotation is coming to scholarly content, but there are key choices to be made that will dramatically affect the collective outcome we achieve. Digital annotation is not a new idea. The first conceptions of what would become the internet imagined it as enabling a much more interactive experience over scholarly content, known as the “read-write” web which many have lamented that we never achieved. Since 1993, when Mosaic first briefly experimented with native annotation, dozens of projects have tried without success. There are many reasons for this failure: a lack of standards, an unwillingness to adopt proprietary systems and centralized implementations, poor user experience, and slow browsers among others.