scholarlyinuniverse

Scholarlyinuniverse is a proposed online platform designed to unify scholarly content across disciplines into an interconnected repository. The project envisions a wiki-like knowledge base that hosts articles, datasets, code, conference proceedings, preprints, and theses, with rich metadata and interoperable licensing. It emphasizes openness, community governance, and semantic search to help researchers discover connections between ideas, methods, and data.

Content model and collaboration: Any registered user could contribute, edit, or annotate entries, with revision history and attribution. The platform would support various levels of review, from lightweight annotations to formal peer review, depending on the item. It would provide persistent identifiers such as DOIs and ORCID integration for authors, export formats for reuse, and cross-linking to ontologies and external databases. Licensing would favor open licenses to maximize reuse and transparency.

Development and governance: The concept emerged as part of open-science initiatives in the early 2020s, drawing involvement from academic libraries, research consortia, and software developers. A governance charter would outline roles for editors, reviewers, and community moderators, along with funding strategies and sustainability plans to ensure long-term operation and trust in the content.

Reception and potential impact: Proponents argue that scholarlyinuniverse could lower access barriers, improve discoverability, and reduce silos in scholarly information. Critics raise concerns about quality control, long-term sustainability, and potential conflicts with traditional publishers. As a conceptual project, its realization depends on broad community adoption, robust technical interoperability, and stable governance. Scholarlyinuniverse remains a topic of discussion in the broader debate over open scholarly infrastructure.