Looking Ahead: The Research Nexus and the State of Metadata in 2050

March 2025

Looking Ahead: The Research Nexus and the State of Metadata in 2050

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.

Strategists

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.

Decision-makers

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.

Practitioners

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.

What this article covers

  • Looking back to look forward — how Crossref metadata grew from a handful of bibliographic fields in 2000 to over 30 research output types and rich relationship data today
  • The Research Nexus concept — the “complex, evolving network of objects, along with descriptions of how they relate”, and why this framing now underpins scholarly infrastructure
  • PIDs as the backbone — how DOIs, ORCID iDs, ROR IDs, and other persistent identifiers make the Research Nexus tractable at scale
  • Research Nexus in 2050 — emerging output types (computational notebooks, virtual and augmented reality experiences, AI-assisted research) and what they require from metadata infrastructure
  • Beyond publication counts — a future where assessment recognises research practices, broader impact, and activities alongside research, not just published papers
  • Challenges ahead — cultural resistance to open-data defaults, the financial sustainability of open infrastructure, and the importance of globally inclusive systems that resist regionalisation and fragmentation

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Read on Science Editor
Published
4 March 2025

Cite as

Pentz, E., Rittman, M., & Tkaczyk, D. (2025). Looking Ahead: The Research Nexus and the State of Metadata in 2050. Science Editor, 48(1). https://doi.org/10.36591/SE-4801-13

Page maintainer: Ed Pentz
Last updated: 2025-March-04