Transparency in open science outputs -: Ensuring Transparency, Reproducibility, and Credit for All Supporting Research Contributions

An ongoing challenge relevant to most research disciplines is the difficulty in citing 100+ digital objects such as datasets, software, samples, and images. Journals require authors to place citations over some set limit into supplemental information, where individual citations are not properly indexed, not linked to the manuscript, nor tracked accurately. Citing these research products is critical to enable transparent and reproducible research and for researchers, institutions, and project managers to trace citation, get appropriate credit, and report impact to funders. 

 

Open Science practices encourage providing proper attribution for the digital objects that support research findings and outcomes. Journals commonly redirect authors with many digital object citations to move those to the supplemental information where they are not indexed.  This means: 

• Creators of these digital objects do not get attribution and credit for their contribution to the scholarly literature 
• Funders cannot measure use, impact and derived value from these digital objects
• Machine-actionable transparency is not possible. And over time, the supplement has a high probability of not being maintained by the publisher.  

We need to develop a scalable citation implementation strategy to enable open transparent and traceable research, which allows integration into common citation/impact metrics

 

The findings of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Complex Citations Working Group have produced key requirements (R1 - R10) for Complex Citation Objects (CCOs) to achieve our goals. In summary: 

• CCOs capture enough detail to ensure proper credit, traceability, and transparency of cited materials (R1), supporting machine-actionable attribution for each referenced object (R2).
• CCOs do not accrue credit themselves but simply list data and digital identifiers that require citation tracking (R3).
• CCOs are stable, identifiable, versioned, resolvable, and persistent (R4, R5).
• CCOs use standardized structures, limited to two PID graph levels, with a strong preference to utilize persistent identifiers (R6, R6.1, R7).
• CCOs remain open, accessible, and flexible for various use cases, with an open license, and sufficient metadata (R8-R10).

 

The full recommendations were published ahead of a presentation at the last RDA plenary session (Agarwal et al. 2024). The recommendations were based on use cases that identified the roles and responsibilities of the Complex Citation Workflow Actors necessary for the Complex Citation Objects (CCOs) to be used in practice.

 

The Complex Citations Working Group is moving to a new phase where the recommendations need to be tested, evaluated and proven. To this end we are keen to inspire collaboration through new use cases, pilot implementations, to include repositories, journals, indexers and researchers to develop a new project and entrain more communities to take this work forward.

 

Reference: 

Agarwal, D., Ayliffe, J., J. H. Buck, J., Damerow, J., Parton, G., Stall, S., Stockhause, M., & Wyborn, L. (2024). Complex Citation Working Group Recommendation (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14106603