As research itself changes, an increasing variety of research outputs are available. Metadata—including persistent identifiers (PIDs)—describes the research objects that are essential for discovery, citation, provenance, and trust. In addition to research outputs, the people doing the research, and the organizations funding and supporting the research need to be transparently identified, through, for example, ORCID iDs1 and ROR IDs.2 It is also essential to capture the relationships between these outputs, people, and organizations in an open and dynamic way. Before the digital age, the focus was primarily on the published paper. Now there is open access to datasets, code, materials, equipment, funders, supporting institutions, preprints, posters, and so much more that result from a single project. Each of these components can be reused, repurposed, or discussed as part of a different project. At Crossref, we use the term the research nexus to refer to this complex, evolving network of objects, along with descriptions of how they relate.  We see the development and description of the research nexus as key to communicating science in the next 25 years. It is much bigger than Crossref, and a number of organizations are pursuing similar goals from different perspectives. Our contribution is to collect, maintain, and make available identifiers and metadata from the organizations that publish research outputs.3 We also seek to supplement this metadata with other community sources,4 and to run automated enrichment strategies at scale to provide additional metadata and relationships that were not captured earlier.5 There is potential for us and […]