Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You.
Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem.
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work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing.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.
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (v2.0, 2025)
POSI version 2.0 released October 2025 The POSI Adopters reviewed the version 1.1 principles and consulted with the community to create version 2.0, released in October 2025. The new/always-current …
A protocol for attributable modular research contribution - Matsuthoughts
I wrote this essay in response to Seemay Chou's call for essays on systemic bottlenecks to science. Structural change in scholarly communication practices i…
Hypermedia
Welcome to the Hypermedia Protocol: a decentralized publishing and discussion network
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
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.
The Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Journals, Open-Access and Distributed Filtering
Current methods of disseminating scholarly information focus on the use of journals who retain exclusive rights in the material they publish. Recently there has been increasing dissatisfaction with this model, with suggestions for alternative approaches such as "Open Access".
The anatomy of a nanopublication
As the amount of scholarly communication increases, it is increasingly difficult for specific core scientific statements to be found, connected and curated. Additionally, the redundancy of these statements in multiple fora makes it difficult to determine attribution, quality and provenance. To tackle these challenges, the Concept Web Alliance has promoted the notion of nanopublications (core scientific statements with associated context). In this document, we present a model of nanopublications along with a Named Graph/RDF serialization of the model. Importantly, the serialization is defined completely using already existing community-developed technologies. Finally, we discuss the importance of aggregating nanopublications and the role that the Concept Wiki plays in facilitating it.
Blog | Lexicon Community | Offprint
A working group that stewards a shared namespace for AT Protocol schemas: built in the open, governed collectively, and free for anyone to use.
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…
Scholary infrastructure and the research nexus
The research nexus is "a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society." (crossref.org/documentation/research-nexus/)
How Grobid uses Crossref metadata to enrich bibliographic information - Crossref
Schema 5.5 now available: adding CRediT, new record types for blogs and posters, and more - Crossref
Scholarly blogs and their place in the research nexus - Crossref
Rogue Scholar
SemRepo.org
Science discussions of retracted articles on Bluesky: public scrutiny or misinformation spreading?
