An ongoing challenge in some research communities is the difficulty in properly citing 100+ digital objects such as datasets, software, samples, and images that might all be assigned with individual digital object identifiers (DOIs). Journals commonly push authors to place citations over some set limit into the supplemental information, where the individual citations are not properly indexed, not linked to the manuscript, nor tracked accurately. This is critical to (1) enable reproducible research and (2) for researchers, institutions, and project managers to be able to trace citation and usage of their work, get appropriate credit, and report on impact to funders.

We propose the term ‘reliquary’ to describe aggregated individual objects used to form a dataset for a specific paper. A reliquary may contain hundreds to millions of objects, often provided by different research groups and stored in different repositories. Citations may need to include subsets of objects from multiple collections. Credit needs to be directed to the creators and funders of individual digital objects in the collection and we need to develop a scalable implementation strategy. This includes the development of both infrastructure and best practice guidelines to make it easier for researchers to use this type of citation and allow integration into common citation metrics as an established credit system for research.

In this Townhall we invite everyone interested to join the effort and work towards a community-agreed solution. Initial work has started in 2019 with a tenacious group of researchers, repositories managers, infrastructure, journal staff, and indexers to define the problem as well as outline a basic approach that applies to most situations and develop early drafts of the recommendations. We want to engage with the broader community, identify more use cases and ask for your feedback and support to finalize these recommendations and identify adopters. The work is related to the new working group “Complex Citations” of the Research Data Alliance. All are welcome to participate in this townhall and join the working group: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/complex-citations-working-group.