Haris, Stocker and Auer confront a structural limitation of document-centred scholarly communication: PDFs circulate successfully as documents while much of their knowledge remains difficult for machines to retrieve, compare and recombine. Their response is the Open Research Knowledge Graph, where scholarly contributions become structured semantic objects and ORKG Papers receive DOI-based persistent identification. The decisive conceptual move is to make knowledge itself citable, not merely the container in which knowledge was published. Versioning is equally significant: once published, an ORKG Paper is fixed, while subsequent states become separately identified versions connected through provenance chains. Persistence therefore does not imply immobility; it creates an auditable architecture for change. By linking scholarly claims to articles, researchers, organisations and DataCite infrastructures, the paper establishes a bridge between semantic knowledge representation and global scholarly communication. Citability, provenance and machine actionability converge as complementary conditions for transforming documents into reusable epistemic objects.
