  The general pupose of the scholarly communication process is to support the
creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. At a finer
granularity, there exists multiple stages which, when confronted by a member of
the community, have different requirements and therefore different solutions.
In order to take a researcher's idea from an initial inspiration to a community
resource, the scholarly communication infrastructure may be required to 1)
provide a scientist initial seed ideas; 2) form a team of well suited
collaborators; 3) located the most appropriate venue to publish the formalized
idea; 4) determine the most appropriate peers to review the manuscript; and 5)
disseminate the end product to the most interested members of the community.
Through the various delinieations of this process, the requirements of each
stage are tied soley to the multi-functional resources of the community: its
researchers, its journals, and its manuscritps. It is within the collection of
these resources and their inherent relationships that the solutions to
scholarly communication are to be found. This paper describes an associative
network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium
for supporting the scholarly communication process.
