Turn research into stackable, citable knowledge units — signed nanopublications with CiTO-typed citations on an open, decentralised network.
Open source · open governance · your nanopubs outlive Science Live.
Science Live is a platform and toolset for publishing scientific claims, citations, and replication outcomes as nanopublications — small, signed, semantically-typed RDF units that live on a decentralised network independent of any single hosting platform.
Where current scholarly citation infrastructure (DOIs, OpenCitations, WikiCite) excels at crediting prior work, Science Live adds the missing piece: a citable target on the publishing side so the intent of a citation — extends, uses-method-in, qualifies, confirms, disputes — becomes machine-actionable rather than buried in PDF prose.
We support three production paths:
- Extract · LLM pipelines turning existing PDFs into typed citation nanopubs (complements GROBID, CEC, GRAPHIA, and the wider open-citation extraction community)
- Author · a Zotero plugin so the author of a citing work declares intent at write time
- Annotate · an expert reader types citations they find in someone else's paper — crowd-sourced citation typing, signed and contestable
All three paths converge on the same atomic, signed, addressable nanopub on the open network.
Science Live's flagship application is publishing replication studies as citable chains, following the FORRT framework (Röseler et al. 2025). Each paper-rooted replication produces a six-step chain — Quote-with-comment → AIDA → FORRT Claim → Replication Study → Replication Outcome → CiTO Citation — where every step is a separately signed nanopublication with its own URI. An apex Research Synthesis nanopub wraps the chain into a single citable target.
The result: a future paper can cite a specific Outcome, a specific Study design, or the specific Quote that anchored the chain — not just the replication paper as a whole. Replication becomes machine-actionable data, and the trust gradient (LLM-extracted → Reader-annotated → Author-validated → FORRT-replicated) becomes explicit and click-resolvable.
The forrt-replication-template is a self-contained GitHub template that turns this pattern into a working scaffold: clone the template, drop in a paper PDF, and get a Zenodo-archived release plus the full signed nanopublication chain on the open network. Domain-portable via a DOMAIN.md swap — currently shipped with a biodiversity + Earth-observation default flavour, adaptable to other computational-reproducibility-based fields.
| Repo | Purpose |
|---|---|
| science-live-platform | Platform monorepo — web app, API, Zotero plugin, viewer/embed components |
| forrt-replication-template | Self-contained GitHub template for paper-rooted FORRT replication studies — paper PDF in, Zenodo-archived release + signed nanopublication chain out |
| sciencelivehub.github.io | Source for the sciencelive4all.org marketing site |
| citex2026-stackable-citations | CiTeX 2026 workshop talk — "Stackable Citation Knowledge: Building on Nanopublications for Climate and Biodiversity Research" by Anne Fouilloux and Jean Iaquinta. Slidev deck, recorded demo, references. (live deck · demo video DOI) |
- Platform: https://platform.sciencelive4all.org · open · CC-BY 4.0 · no login required to read
- Zotero plugin: install from
science-live-platform/zotero/(Zotero 7+) - Replication scaffold: use the
forrt-replication-templateas a GitHub template - Marketing + governance: https://sciencelive4all.org
Published nanopubs live in the decentralised nanopublication network — content-addressable via Trusty URIs (Kuhn et al. 2021), independent of any single platform shutting down.
Science Live is a collaboration between:
- VitenHub AS — Norway · coordination, deployment, sustainability
- Knowledge Pixels — Switzerland · nanopublication network infrastructure (registry, query, resolver)
- Prophet Town — design and engineering
Funded by the Astera Institute.
License: source code is MIT unless otherwise noted; published nanopublications are CC-BY 4.0.
Issues, contributions, discussions: open on the relevant repository's issue tracker. The platform itself is the science-live-platform repo.
If you use Science Live in your research or in a publication:
Fouilloux, A., & Iaquinta, J. (2026). Stackable Citation Knowledge: Building on Nanopublications for Climate and Biodiversity Research. CiTeX 2026 — Workshop on Citation Extraction and Parsing, DIPF Leibniz Institute, Frankfurt. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20391905
For the standalone demo video archived separately on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20419561
Updated 2026-05-28.