A nanopublication is the smallest unit of publishable information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author.

Individual nanopublications can be cited by others and tracked for their impact on the community.

Nanopublications are a natural response to the explosion of high-quality contextual information that overwhelms the capacity of conventional research articles in scholarly communication.

With nanopublications, it is possible to disseminate individual data as independent publications with or without an accompanying research article. Furthermore, because nanopublications can be attributed and cited, they provide incentives for researchers to make their data available in standard formats that drive data accessibility and interoperability.

A nanopublication has two basic elements:

The Assertion: An assertion is a minimal unit of thought, expressing a relationship between two concepts (called the Subject and the Object) using a third concept (called the Predicate). The Provenance: This is metadata providing some context about the assertion. Provenance means, ‘how this came to be’ and includes Supporting metadata (like methods) and Attribution metadata (such as authors, institutions, time-stamps, grants, links to DOIs, URLs).