Development Partners
The TrustMarc Initiative is being developed in collaboration with a growing community of libraries, publishers, repositories, research organizations, non-profits, and technology providers.
Coherent Digital is the founding development partner and has led the initial design, implementation, and deployment of the TrustMarc infrastructure.
We are now inviting additional Development Partners to help shape the next phase of the initiative.
Why Participate?
Development partners will have the opportunity to:
Increase the visibility, impact, and discoverability of their content.
Help shape TrustMarc standards, and policies.
Influence technical specifications and interoperability frameworks.
Pilot TrustMarc issuance and integration workflows.
Demonstrate leadership in trust, transparency, and research integrity.
Participate in a growing ecosystem of libraries, publishers, repositories, and service providers committed to strengthening trust in digital information.
We’re looking to partner with…
Universities and Extension Programs
Universities produce quantities of practical and community-focused knowledge through extension programs, research centers, institutes, public engagement initiatives, and continuing education activities. Much of this content never reaches the audiences who could benefit from it because users don’t trust it.
We seek university partners interested in making these materials more discoverable, preserving them for the long term, and demonstrating their societal impact.
Development partners will help define how TrustMarc frameworks can expand impact, driving public scholarship, and community-engaged research.
Publishers, Scholarly Societies and Non-Profits
Publishers create trust through their expertise, editorial processes, and standards. But reputation does not always travel with content—especially reports, white papers, datasets, conference proceedings, and other non-traditional publications that often lack the trust infrastructure available to journals and books. TrustMarcs make trust visible, portable, and machine-readable, driving impact and revenues.
We seek partners interested in extending trust beyond traditional journals and books to include reports, conference proceedings, datasets, multimedia, educational resources, and emerging forms of scholarly communication.
Together, we will explore how TrustMarcs can enhance discoverability, strengthen brand reputation, support AI interoperability, and create new opportunities for engagement and revenue generation.
Institutional Repositories
Institutional repositories contain a wealth of valuable scholarship, datasets, reports, theses, preprints, and other research outputs. Yet many repositories struggle with visibility, trust signaling, preservation, and integration into external AI and discovery systems.
We’re looking for repository partners interested in testing TrustMarcs as a way to communicate repository standards, strengthen trust in repository content, improve discoverability, and provide machine-readable indicators of stewardship, authenticity, and preservation.
Development partners will help define how TrustMarc frameworks can expand impact, driving public scholarship, and community-engaged research.
AI services, Aggregators, Discovery Providers, Indexing Services
TrustMarcs help aggregators scale trust assessment across thousands of content providers without having to reinvent it for each one. They help AI systems understand the trust context surrounding content rather than treating all content as equivalent.
We’re seeking development partners interested in integrating TrustMarc metadata and trust signals into AI, search, discovery, and recommendation workflows.
These partners will help shape how TrustMarcs are displayed, weighted, exchanged, and utilized across the information ecosystem, creating new ways for users to identify trustworthy content quickly and confidently.