Collaborative curation of bibliographic metadata

A presentation given at the Dagstuhl Seminar Open Scholarly Information Systems: Status Quo, Challenges, Opportunities on 16 September 2025. Abstract: This talk sketches out several facets of a collaborative approach to the curation of scholarly information. It starts by outlining two use cases from the Wikipedia ecosystem: The first is that when media files from open-access sources are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, then bibliographic metadata about the open-access source need to be curated with each file on Wikimedia Commons. The second is that if Wikipedia articles are translated from one language to another, then the bibliographic metadata of the cited references will have to be curated for each language version of the article. Such use cases would benefit from a shared repository of bibliographic information, which is what the WikiCite initiative is about that uses Wikidata as a hub to collect and curate bibliographic information about scholarly sources cited on Wikimedia projects. Next, the Scholia tool is introduced, which uses the information from Wikidata to provides some dozens of scholarly profile types (e.g. author, work, topic, organization, award, taxon, gene or location). For each profile type, it generates a HTML page that contains a number of visualizations that are based on preformulated Wikidata SPARQL queries parametrized by the entity to be profiled. This way, Scholia users do not need to have SPARQL knowledge but if they do, they can use it to finetune or modify the queries to explore the data further. Scholia has a range of features that are relevant to the discussion of open scholarly infrastructures. For instance, many Scholia profiles have an "improve data" button that leads to a dedicated curation page listing known data quality issues, e.g. author name strings yet to be disambiguated, along with links to tooling that helps address these issues. Some of its visualizations provide impact proxies. The profile for an individual work include a panel listing statements supported by a given work, or Wikipedia mentions of it, or information about relevant retractions. The profile for this very Dagstuhl Seminar includes co-author networks and a list of recent publications by workshop participants. Next, the platform zbMATH Open is introduced, which covers the mathematical research literature in a way similar to how the DBLP platform covers the computer science literature. zbMATH Open profiles authors and publications and, through its sister platform swMATH, also curates links between mathematical publications and the associated software. Finally, nanopublications are introduced as miniature knowledge graphs that can represent individual units of curation. They can be queried, shared and aggregated and are functionally similar to individual wiki edits or git commits, yet they are structured and machine actionable in a way that makes them compatible with larger knowledge graphs, for which they might serve as a vehicle to exchange curation information.