A Protocol for Exchanging Scientific Citations

Data and publications are major outputs of science, but are typically managed in different ways in data archives and institutional repositories. In this paper we discuss a protocol for exchanging cross-citations between data and publications, so that the links between can be tracked and used. We describe a simple instance of such a protocol based on the well-known Trackback protocol, and give an example of how the protocol can be used to exchange citations between a data archive and a publication repository. We conclude by discussing the generalisation of the protocol and its implications for scholarly discourse.