FAQ

What is Scholix?
Scholix is short for Scholarly Link Exchange. The goal of Scholix is to improve the links between scholarly literature and research data as well as between data and data.

The Scholix initiative offers:
  • a universal, global framework that enables information about the links between scholarly articles and data to be exchanged
  • technical guidelines that specify how the interoperability framework will work
  • a common conceptual model, an information model and open exchange protocols.
Scholix is global in scope and is an initiative of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the World Data System (WDS). It is supported by a number of partner organisations, with many people involved in its development.

How does Scholix work?
Scholix provides an overarching framework for existing technical initiatives that individually address parts of the overall problem that is hindering better linking between data and literature. It also provides a conceptual model and an information model.

Within the Scholix framework:
  • Repositories, data centres, journals and others provide information about the links between literature and data that they hold to community 'hubs' such as OpenAire, Crossref and DataCite. This supports and respects existing community-specific practices and the existing means of exchanging this information.
  • The community 'hubs' - which are natural places to collect and exchange information about the links between literature and data - commit to a common information model for exchanging the links that they hold and an agreed open exchange method enables this to occur.
The Scholix conceptual model is about the link between two objects, such as a journal article and the underpinning data. Rather than describing in detail the properties of each of the two objects, the conceptual model focuses on the relationship between the objects. It also enables a record of who asserted the link and who made the link available.

The Scholix information model provides the detail of the conceptual model. It specifies what information is needed in what is called a Link Information Package. This includes what elements of the conceptual model are mandatory fields (publishing date and link publisher) and optional fields (various).

Scholix does not mandate how to format and exchange a Link Information Package. Therefore information can be formatted and exchanged, potentially using a variety of models and protocols such as JSON, XML or RDF formats and OAI-PMH, RESTful or SPARQL protocols. The application of encoding and semantic standards are pending and will be developed by the Scholarly Link Exchange Working Group under the auspices of RDA and ICSU-WDS.

More information about how Scholix works can be found in the following 2017 article for D-Lib Magazine: The Scholix Framework for Interoperability in Data-Literature Information Exchange.

Who is supporting the Scholix initiative?
A list of supporting organisations can be found under About.

What are the Scholix community hubs?
Community 'hubs' - natural places to collect and exchange information about the links between literature and data - commit via Scholix to a common information model for exchanging the links that they hold and an agreed open exchange method enables this to occur.

There are a number of natural community hubs that collect and expose data-literature links from large communities, including CrossRef, DataCite, Europe PMC, the European Nucleotide Archive, and OpenAire.
Three services offer public queries with a Scholix-compliant interface:
See Implementors for more information.

How can I get involved in the Scholix initiative?
To join the Scholix effort to increase the links between scholarly literature and data, you can become a contributor and also a consumer. To become a contributor, provide links between literature and data to the Scholix community hubs. To become a consumer, query the Scholix community hubs for data-literature links and enrich your database with these links.
For more information, including user stories, see Participate.