Article · September 2022
The scholarly record is not static: works are revised, corrected, and sometimes retracted, and readers need to see those changes wherever they meet a work, not only on the version they happen to land on. This 2022 preprint sets out how richer relationship metadata can make that possible.
The paper examines Crossref’s role in maintaining trust in the scholarly record, and how corrections, retractions, and errata are expressed in metadata today. It reframes Crossmark: not only a badge to display a work’s status to readers, but relationship metadata that connects a work to its later updates, so that a correction or retraction travels with the work across the many places it is cited, indexed, and read.
That framing places updates, corrections, and retractions inside the wider Research Nexus: the value lies in the relationships between outputs, not in any single record or metadata element in isolation.
The paper looks at where today’s approach falls short, and at how a more connected and dynamic model of the record might develop.
