FAQ: What was the first nanopublication?
created: 2026-07-16T11:40:38Z
creator: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-0234
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
has nanopub type: Question
introduces: What was the first nanopublication?
type: Nanopublication
has assertion: assertion
has provenance: provenance
has publication info: pubinfo

sig
has algorithm: RSA
signed by: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-0234

What was the first nanopublication?
type: Question
is part of: faq
has content: The concept of nanopublications was introduced by Barend Mons and Jan Velterop in 2009, in their paper Nano-Publication in the e-science era. The paper proposed atomic, machine-readable assertions with their own provenance and metadata as a new unit of scholarly communication. Concrete nanopublications followed in subsequent years, most of them unsigned, accumulating in the first-generation nanopub-server network. The earliest dated trusty-URI nanopublications discoverable there are from 16 June 2014, part of a corpus of unsigned biomedical assertions extracted from NCBI's GeneRIF database by the Krauthammer Lab at Yale — for example, RAdBeVv56ZiRgSdbHMEk0J4C3iV5mDNBSlwo87B5P-u9c. The earliest signed entry preserved in the current (second-generation) Nanopub Registry dates from 18 August 2015: RATNbqwXNo6aO3T7BdCquQSdqZjXeisoSSTudO3qJ9KwY, an index of three example nanopubs produced while validating the signing infrastructure.