Referencesscholarly

Referencesscholarly is a hypothetical framework described here to illustrate a standardized approach to scholarly references and metadata interoperability across publishing platforms, repositories, and research-management systems. The term combines 'references' and 'scholarly' to emphasize precise provenance, versioning, and semantic linking in academic citations.

Concept and scope: A referencesscholarly record would typically include a persistent identifier, bibliographic fields (title, authors, year, venue), the DOI or URL, and optional metadata like abstracts, keywords, licenses, and access status. It would also model relationships (cites, isPartOf, isSupplementTo) and link to author identifiers such as ORCID.

Relationship to existing standards: The concept is designed to be compatible with or complementary to Crossref and DOI systems, as well as BibTeX, RIS, JATS, Dublin Core, schema.org's ScholarlyArticle, and citation ontologies like CiTO. Adoption would entail a common vocabulary and encoding, plus versioning and provenance tracking.

Applications and governance: In theory, referencesscholarly could enable cross-publisher discovery, robust citation analytics, and accurate bibliographic linking in libraries and research information systems. Because it is hypothetical, governance, namespace management, licensing, and sustainability would need consensus among publishers, libraries, and funders.

Criticisms and challenges: Potential drawbacks include complexity, fragmentation risk, competing standards, and the effort required for widespread adoption. Proponents stress the benefits of improved interoperability and trust in scholarly citations.