sourcesofficial

Sourcesofficial is a hypothetical online platform described as a centralized index of sources for research, journalism, and academic publishing. The project envisions a searchable database that records source metadata, provenance, licensing, and citation context, enabling users to verify references and trace information to its origins.

It would support contributor records, annotations, reliability ratings, and provenance scores, with records linked to DOIs, URLs, or other persistent identifiers. Automated crawlers could ingest citations from public documents, while humans might curate metadata to improve accuracy. The platform would offer an application programming interface and export formats for integration with reference managers.

Governance would be community-driven, with open-source software and a transparent decision process for edits, moderation, and dispute resolution. Content licensing could vary by source, with metadata under permissive licenses while source materials remain governed by their original terms. Privacy protections and anti-vandalism measures would be essential.

Reception among scholars and journalists would be mixed: proponents see it as enhancing transparency and reproducibility, while critics worry about misattribution, vandalism, bias, and the challenges of standardizing metadata across disciplines. Adoption would depend on data quality, interoperability with existing databases, and sustainable funding.

See also: Crossref, Wikidata, Zotero.