Article · March 2025
Published in Science Editor (Vol. 48, No. 1, March 2025), this feature article uses 25 years of scholarly metadata history as a lens to look forward. The authors trace the journey from Crossref’s first DOIs in 2000 — when records carried little more than journal title, author, volume, issue, and page number — to today’s Research Nexus of 30+ output types and rich relationships between works, people, organisations, and funders. They then sketch what scholarly metadata might look like in 2050.
Understand where scholarly metadata is heading. A long-view perspective on how the Research Nexus reshapes what gets counted, assessed, and valued in scholarship over the next 25 years.
Plan for richer assessment beyond publication counts. The authors anticipate research evaluation shifting toward practices, broader impact, and the wider set of activities around research — not just papers.
Prepare for new output types and tighter relationships. Computational notebooks, AI-assisted research, and immersive scholarly outputs will need persistent identifiers and structured relationships if they are to participate in the record.
