A protocol for attributable modular research contribution - Matsuthoughts

MIRA 2026 - Modular Interoperable Research Attribution

Catalyzing Modular Interoperable Research Attribution - A workshop to design and prototype interoperable frameworks for modular research attribution. June 7-11, 2026 in Ireland.

MIRA 2026 - Modular Interoperable Research Attribution

Catalyzing Modular Interoperable Research Attribution - A workshop to design and prototype interoperable frameworks for modular research attribution. June 7-11, 2026 in Ireland.

The Scientific Contribution Graph: Automated Literature-based Technological Roadmapping at Scale

Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Scientific contributions are rarely developed in isolation, but build upon prior contributions, such as problem framings, experimental methods, and empirical findings. Understanding these prerequisite relationships is important for studying scientific progress, and for automated scientific discovery systems that must reason about which existing capabilities can be used to develop new ones (e.g. Lu et al., 2024; Jansen et al., 2025b; Baek et al., 2025).

Towards Modular Open Science

Science is trapped in a paper-shaped box. In this talk at the ATProto community, Rowan Cockett introduces the structural states of scientific components — the floor, the buckets, and the shelf — and makes the case for a second wave of modular science where modularity emerges from packaging rather than being imposed as a precondition. The talk introduces the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA), a new standard for modular and composable scientific content.

The Research Nexus vision for a more connected scholarly community

Crossref envisions “a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”. This Research Nexus expands on the importance of research objects being persistently and uniquely identified. The scholarly community has an established practice of connecting things such as citations to others’ work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing. The Research Nexus brings together metadata and relationships to build a joined-up picture of the scholarly ecosystem and helps everyone identify these relationships and how they change through time. This vision is possible if all parts of the scholarly ecosystem (and beyond) work together, including various scholarly infrastructure organizations.

A ten-year drive to credit authors for their work — and why there’s still more to do

Nature - Information about the roles of each author of a paper can help to build trust, integrity and responsible research assessment. Coordinated efforts are needed to consolidate progress.

modular research preprint server demo with meaningful social context

a concept preprint server demonstrating what kinds of features would be possible in the future with more modular research publishing and an open social protocol to layer in the public discourse in meaningful ways.

NLnet; Nanoarguments

Scientific knowledge is currently scattered across papers, repositories, and disconnected platforms, with no structured way to trace how claims connect to evidence or how arguments develop. Nanoarguments builds a framework and tools for creating, browsing, and contributing to a global, federated graph of scientific discourse and evidence. Researchers and their communities can collaboratively structure claims, evidence chains, and discussion as nanopublications, which are small, cryptographically signed Linked Data snippets with precise provenance and authorship, published to a decentralized peer-to-peer network. The project builds upon the Nanodash interface to help users browse, edit, and aggregate discourse and evidence graphs, and integrates with dokieli to enable in-context authoring of nanopublications as inline annotations while reading or writing a document. A bidirectional ActivityPub connector bridges the nanopublication network and the fediverse, allowing discourse threads to start as social exchanges and crystallize into persistent, machine-readable evidence records. The project will be piloted with early adopter research groups in discourse and evidence modeling. All components will be released as open-source modules that other systems can build upon.