Presenter
Patrick Hochstenbach (@hochstenbach)
Abstract
Modern research assessment recognizes contributions far beyond traditional journal articles, conference papers, and books. These include outputs and activities such as software, reports, courses, live performances, media appearances, and leadership. Traditional contributions are captured in research portals and made discoverable through persistent identifiers such as ORCID and DOI, but non-traditional contributions live on the open web, where systematic discovery is far from straightforward.
The Research Contribution Claim Network proposes a decentralized, semantic-web-native architecture to make this long tail of scholarship visible. Researchers post on social networks such as Mastodon, referencing a contribution and mentioning a “claim bot” account. The bot uses a network of summarization services to extract metadata from the referenced contribution and produce an RDF/JSON-LD claim assertion. Claims are shown to the researcher and forwarded to their Research Information Management System (RIMS). Identity, trust and verification rely on `rel=“me”` bidirectional links between Mastodon, RIMS, and inAcademia, a pan-European service that confirms a network identity belongs to a researcher at a European institution.
In a 2024/2025 experiment with SURF (NL) and IMEC-IDLab (BE), a prototype of the Claim Network architecture monitored references posted by a random sample of 100 researchers from the “Academics on Mastodon” list. The prototype generated a metadata summary for 91% of the posted URLs. In this talk, we present the Claim Network blueprint, walk through the RDF-based protocols, and invite the SWIB community to launch similar implementations. A Claim Network can not only facilitate the discovery of a rich variety of research contributions, but also provide incentives for using social media platforms as a rich scholarly communication channel.