Cross platform softlinks?

Cross platform softlinks?

I am using a scientific software that require softlinks to work with
reasonable efficiency. However, I'd also like to sync my data, that must
contain bare data from that software (i.e. not packaged inside tar/zip
files) over DropBox with BoxCryptor -- a combination that allows neither
softlinks nor hardlinks.
I vaguely remember, that in older times unix softlinks were just text
files containing the link target, that were then treated specially. Such a
concept would probably be compatible.
On Windows I work with this data using cygwin, such that this is not a
problem -- cygwin symlinks are either plain text files or an abuse of
Window's ".LNK" format, depending on options, i.e. normal files. I was
wondering if a similiar behaviour could be achieved on Linux?
This would also help when hosting a Linux guest inside a VM with access to
windows directories. For these directories typically real symlinks are not
supported either.