TextRefs is now an association

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today we sat down in Zürich, signed the statutes, and founded TextRefs as an association (Verein) under Art. 60 ff. of the Swiss Civil Code.

Three months ago we open-sourced the project and described ourselves as “an association in formation”. That qualifier is gone. TextRefs is a legal entity now, and we are genuinely delighted about it.

What happened today

The founding assembly adopted the statutes, and they took effect immediately (Art. 22). Moritz Mähr signed as president, Luz Christopher Seiberth as recording officer. We sent the signed statutes and the founding minutes to the Cantonal Tax Office of Zürich the same day.

Every founding document is public and has been for a while — the statutes, the mission, the governance regulation, and the expense regulation. The German texts are the legally binding ones; the English versions are convenience translations. You can read all of them from the association overview or the German original.

The tax office has said yes — almost

On 27 August 2026 the Cantonal Tax Office of Zürich assured us of tax exemption on grounds of public benefit (Gemeinnützigkeit), on condition that we founded the association exactly as we had presented it. We did, and we have told them so.

An assurance is not yet a legally binding decision. So here is the honest version: the hard part is behind us, one formal step is still ahead. Donations are not tax-deductible yet. They become deductible once the decision arrives, and we will say so here when it does.

What we changed along the way

The tax office read our Art. 15 closely and found it broader than the governance model we had described. As written, it left room to pay board members for special or operational services. That was a fair objection, so we amended it. Board members now serve in an honorary capacity and may claim only their actual expenses and cash outlays — nothing else (Art. 15).

Because a regulation may not contradict the statutes, the expense regulation and the governance regulation moved with it.

We are happy with where that landed. It is a good day when the tax office and your own principles push in the same direction.

What this changes for you

Not much yet — and that is deliberate.

The registry, the standard, and the API are still pre-1.0. Every record is still status: draft, and no identifier carries a persistence promise until expert review promotes it. TextRefs stays bootstrap-funded, non-commercial, and committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.

What is new is the organisation behind all of it. There is now an entity that can hold funds, accept donations and grants, sign agreements with libraries and institutions, and — this is the part that matters most to us — outlive any one of its founders. Stable identifiers are a promise about the future. Making that promise as two people with a GitHub account was never quite enough.

Come and help

We are looking for board members who bring the disciplines that live on canonical references: theology, law and legal history, classical philology, philosophy, mediaeval studies, digital editions, and library and information science. If that is your field, see the open call and write to us via the contact page.

And if you maintain a citation system, build a tool that needs stable passage identifiers, or simply enjoy reading a specification closely — the registry is open and the standard is still soft enough to change.

More soon.

Hello world: TextRefs is now open source

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We are open-sourcing TextRefs — an open, persistent, machine-readable registry for canonical text references in the humanities (Stephanus pages, Bekker lines, chapter–verse, CTS URNs, and the long tail of system-specific locators that scholars actually cite).

Why we started this

Referencing passages in the humanities is, to put it mildly, cumbersome and not well suited to 21st-century digital workflows. Every research database, edition viewer, and bibliographic tool reinvents its own way of pointing at “the same line of Plato,” and none of them line up cleanly. There is no shared, dereferenceable identifier you can paste into a paper, a notebook, a knowledge graph, or a script and trust to still resolve in ten years.

We were annoyed enough by this to do something about it. TextRefs is our attempt at the missing piece: a small, boring, well-specified registry that gives canonical passages a stable URL, a JSON-LD body, and a documented contract — and then gets out of the way of editors, libraries, and downstream tools.

Who is behind it

TextRefs is being set up as a Zürich-based association (Verein) in formation, run by:

Moritz Mähr — digital humanities and open infrastructure (moritzmaehr.ch)
Luz Christopher Seiberth — philosophy and classical reception

We are bootstrap-financed, non-commercial, and committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

Current state — and what “early” really means

This is very early stage. Concretely:

The data model, the JSON-LD context, the URL layout, and the OpenAPI contract are all working drafts and will change without major version bumps until we ship v1.0.
The registry is small and largely illustrative. Coverage of real citation systems is intentionally narrow while we settle the core.
There is no service-level commitment yet. Treat every URL as experimental.

The site itself carries a top banner on every page to make this hard to miss. If you build something against TextRefs today, expect to chase breaking changes for a while.

What we are looking for

If any of the following sounds like you, please get in touch:

Editors, philologists, librarians who maintain canonical reference systems and want them represented properly.
Tool builders (reference managers, edition viewers, annotation tools, knowledge graphs) who would benefit from stable identifiers and are willing to try the contract while it is still soft enough to change.
Reviewers for the standard, the JSON-LD shapes, and the governance documents.
Supporters — financial or in-kind — who want to help a small open-infrastructure project reach a sustainable footing.

The fastest ways to engage:

File an issue or discussion on GitHub.
Read the standard and the API documentation, and tell us where they are wrong.
See Community → Contributing for how to help in code.

Thanks for reading. More soon.

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