With the momentum the Open Access movement gained recently, more and more scientific journals are produced in a digital workflow and published in digital format. Nevertheless, the most often used format for publishing articles on the web is still the Adobe PDF format, which limits the extent to which readers of an article can interact with online content and within their browser environment. This not only separates the formal communication – the article itself – from the informal communication about a publication – the discussion about the article – but also fails to link the different threads of communications which might be going on in parallel and at different places in the scientific community as a whole. In this article we present an AJAX based technology for adding in-context discussion and annotation features to articles published on the web. The approach we took is that of XML based publishing using OpenOffice.org and its ISO standard Open Document format (ODF) for the production workflow of scholarly journals. The online discussion service we developed is linked into the process of rendering OpenOffice.org documents into formats suitable for distribution using XSLT technology. Mark-up in the document determines the location at which readers later can comment on an article directly within the HTML representation generated and displayed in their browsers. Using XSLT for generating HTML representations of articles allows us to provide different designs of the same article in cases where it is published at different web sites in parallel. The discussion service integrates the annotations made to the article at all web sites it is published at, therefore linking online discourse between different communities on the web.