Scientific information communicated in scholarly literature remains largely inaccessible to machines. The global scientific knowledge base is little more than a collection of (digital) documents. The main reason is in the fact that the document is the principal form of communication and since underlying data, software and other materials mostly remain unpublished -the fact that the scholarly article is, essentially, the only form used to communicate scientific information. Based on a use case in life sciences, we argue that virtual research environments and semantic technologies are transforming the capability of research infrastructures to systematically acquire and curate machine readable scientific information communicated in scholarly literature.