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work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing.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.
Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata
This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH. In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.
Two billion citation links in Crossref help research travel further - Crossref
We’ve recently reached an important milestone for the research nexus: the works in our metadata corpus are now connected with over 2 billion citation links! This is a great opportunity to share a dedicated dataset and discuss why these are important for science.
Position paper: persistent identifiers in research infrastructure policy - Crossref
PIDs have become central to national and international open research strategies, but identifiers alone cannot deliver the connected, open record that researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, and policymakers depend on. Effective research infrastructure rests on three interdependent elements: open, persistent identifiers; rich, open, and linked metadata; and the sustainable governance and resilient operation of the organisations involved. Crossref urges policymakers to evaluate all three together.
Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis
Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious "hacks" and workarounds to "mine" publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving "installed base" of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision -- and our empirical work -- contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI's capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.
Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis
Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious ”hacks” and workarounds to ”mine” publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving “installed base” of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision — and our empirical work — contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI’s capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.
Single-Source Publishing Community
Join the Single-Source Publishing Community for open, interoperable, and sustainable scholarly publishing workflows.
Center for Open Science
At the Center for Open Science, our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. Promoting these practices within the research funding and publishing communities accelerates scientific progress
You are Crossref - Crossref
Crossref runs open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions—creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our >25,000 members in 167 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support 2.1 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
Manuscript submission systems and metadata completeness in Crossref: Patterns and associations
The importance of open research information, particularly publication metadata, is widely recognised. Crossref is one of the most important infrastructures for registering open metadata as part of DOI record registration. It is widely known, however, that the metadata of many publications is far from complete, with many publishers making certain metadata openly available, but failing to do so for other metadata elements. Publishers’ ability to register this metadata with Crossref depends on their capacity to capture and retain this data in their production workflows. Manuscript submission systems are an important, yet largely overlooked, factor in the extent to which publishers make metadata available through Crossref. In this paper, we present the results of an analysis investigating the relation between the level of metadata that publishers deposit with Crossref and the submission systems that they deploy for their journals. We have looked at the 153 publishers with the largest amounts of publications in Crossref and concentrate on the four most commonly used systems: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and eJournalPress. We show that some submission systems appear better suited to capturing certain metadata elements. However, there are always cases where publishers using the same system differ widely in the level of metadata they register, suggesting that technology is not the only prohibiting factor and other considerations are at play.
Announcing "AT Scholarly Lexicons": A blueprint for decentralised scholarly communication using the AT Protocol - Marginalia
The Discovery Engine: A Framework for AI-Driven Synthesis and Navigation of Scientific Knowledge Landscapes
Scientific progress relies on the effective accumulation, synthesis, and critical evaluation of knowledge. Traditionally, the well-documented, peer reviewed publication served as the primary standard for filtering and disseminating credible findings within the scientific community. Recently, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in research output, a veritable explosion of scientific publications across all disciplines [1]. Yet, this very abundance creates a paradox: the sheer volume threatens to overwhelm the mechanisms designed for its assimilation and synthesis. Researchers, even within highly specialized subfields, face an almost insurmountable challenge in keeping abreast of relevant developments, integrating disparate findings, and identifying the truly novel signals amidst the noise [2]. This information overload contributes to disciplinary fragmentation, hindering the cross-pollination of ideas essential for disruptive innovation [3]. Furthermore, persistent concerns regarding "reproducibility crisis" [2], predatory journals, inflation of research areas[4], growing retractions and the potential influences of bibliometrics on research direction [5] highlight systemic challenges in validating and prioritizing scientific contributions to fundamental knowledge.
Metagov x Future of Science Seminar - Discourse Graphs with Matt Akamatsu
Open Sourcing Scientific Research with Lab Discourse Graphs
Connected Papers | Find and explore academic papers
A unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.
Connected Papers | Find and explore academic papers
A unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.
Great survey of the "scholarly interface design" frontier that also highlights the emerging role of the atproto.science and modular research ecosystems - @chive.pub @paperstarsorg.bsky.social @cosmik.network @semble.so @margin.at @discoursegraphs.bsky.social @curvenote.com and many more!
leotrs
1/ Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely started arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. That second argument is turning into a field, forming around how science gets read and judged. Here is the map as I see it: aris.pub/blog/scholarly-interface-desi…
