A Call to Reduce Random Collisions with Information

This is a talk that I gave at the Annual Crossref conference (Crossref LIVE17 in Singapore).

They key point I tried to make - reference managers (Mendeley, Readcube, Zotero, Refworks, Paperpile, etc) are in a unique position to connect knowledge to the scientists who need it. These platforms have email and reading lists of researchers. So, when a paper is discussed, a dataset connected to it improve, a protocol from it optimized, or the paper itself is retracted or corrected -- the reference managers can send an alert to everyone who has that paper in their library.

For this to be possible, journals and resource platforms must register metadata with Crossref establishing relationships between an article and its associated materials (data, code, methods, figures, etc).