Cadmore media player playing video Risks and Trust in Pursuit of a Well-functioning Persistent Identifier Infrastructure for Research Recording
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Risks and Trust in Pursuit of a Well-functioning Persistent Identifier Infrastructure for Research Recording
Description:
Risks and Trust in Pursuit of a Well-functioning Persistent Identifier Infrastructure for Research Recording
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/568c0f56-79fe-41f9-9d48-c9df51a4123a/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_3.jpg
Duration:
T00H57M00S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/568c0f56-79fe-41f9-9d48-c9df51a4123a
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/568c0f56-79fe-41f9-9d48-c9df51a4123a/Risks and Trust in Pursuit of a Well-functioning Persistent .mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=iHilvGP9wggW6zvWpV%2BIIrXRfFBbftlAbGfDNKeBfWQ%3D&st=2024-10-16T01%3A06%3A28Z&se=2024-10-16T03%3A11%3A28Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-03-06T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Good morning.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NISO Plus 2023. I'm Gaelle Bequet. I'm the director of the ISSN International Center in Paris, France. And thank you very much for joining us today. Our session has a very long title, starting with risk and trust. I think we can shorten this and title it it risk and trust for identifiers in academia.
I think that's a bit better. It rings better. Anyway, I will give a brief introduction about the context of our presentations today. NISO organized a brainstorming session last September to identify areas of metadata that are of common concern to librarians, publishers and service providers. And three core topics were actually debated structures, exchange of metadata and identifiers.
So I was participating or attending this brainstorming session, and I suggested to hold a session about a study which has been commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange group. This study started in 2021 and the consulting company Scidecode was actually awarded and selected to put this study together or write this study that will be published early February.
You can find the scoping document in Zenodo and the aim of this study was to identify what might be the best possible strategic and operational recommendations to achieve a well functioning PID infrastructure in Europe and beyond. So we're going to hear and listen to our consultants from Scidecode who actually wrote the final report and to a member of Knowledge Exchange group who has participated in the drafting of the scoping document.
So I'm very happy to welcome our three speakers today, starting with Ulrich Herb. Who will give The first presentation. So let me introduce Ulrich. Ulrich Herb is head of the publication and research support department at Saarland University in Germany, He is a sociologist and information scientist, He is also a member of the learned society for information science in the German speaking countries, He is also an associate consultant with Scidecode consulting company.
So, Ulrich, the floor is yours. OK so thanks, Gaelle, for this very polite introduction. And I will give the first presentation about the study on risk and trust in pursuit of a well-functioning, persistent identifier infrastructure, we at scidecode did. And as Gaelle already outlined, the study was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, which is a collaboration between six National Research organizations from Finland, France, Denmark, Germany, UK and the Netherlands with the aim of supporting the use and development of ICT infrastructures for education and research.
As Gaelle also mentioned, the aim of the study was to identify through investigation, analysis and recommendations what could be the best possible strategic and operational paths to achieve for well-functioning PID infrastructure. And KE emphasized a bit on the issues of risk and trust without narrowing it down to technical infrastructures, but also to social components of such infrastructure.
This is the team that did the study. It's a team consisting of the associates of scidecode science consulting, it's Pablo de Castro who will also give a presentation later, it's Laura Rothfritz and me and Joachim Schöpfel as an external partnering consultant. What did we do? An analysis of the current state of the PID landscape in the six key partner countries with the focus on e-infrastructure, focused on the currently available PIDs, for instance for researchers as ORCID or institutional ones as RORs and so on, ut also on new or emerging PIDs as PIDs for conferences or research equipment, facilities or geo samples and so on.
First step was a literature study, followed by expert interviews and the analysis of both fed into the construction of seven case studies which highlighted the issues of risk and trust in the PID infrastructure, Pablo will tell a little bit more about these case studies, and also into the formulation of recommendation for good practice and the best opportunities for achieving a trustworthy and well functioning PID infrastructure. This list of the 18 experts we interviewed, we did 16 interviews.
So two interviews were joint interviews with two partners. And as you see, we tried to cover a wide range of professional backgrounds with the interviewees and a wide range of PID roles. So we did interviews with people from, from National Research and education networks, research funders, libraries, PID service providers, PID users and so on to capture a whole picture of what's going on and what are the issues of risk and trust within this PID infrastructure.
So we got some very selective findings from these interviews before we go on to the recommendations, which are the core of the outputs we produced. These experts predominantly mentioned well-established PIDs that everyone knows more or less as DOIs or ORCID or ROR and they mentioned to a lesser extent emerging PIDs for funders, grants, research activity IDs or Confiderence IDs and also standards like URNs or schemes like ARK. The main benefits that these experts saw in or discovered in PIDs was their interoperability or value added services that can be built on top of these and the availability and interconnectivity of rich meta data associated with the PIDs.
We also found the dichotomy of, so to say, technical bottom up researcher-driven PIDs as, for instance, PIDs for geo samples or research activity IDs, and the more or less admin oriented PIDs, which are more or less top down PIDs with an uptake that's driven by institutions, publishers, research funders, for instance ORCID or ROR, these serve more or less organizational driven demands.
And one thing that was especially important for risk and trust and reliability was open source and open data. Because these two elements allow to rebuild a service that has been discontinued or that failed or that ceased to exist, rebuilt this from scratch by using open source and open data through community engagement. And this is also the next point.
The existence of a community of PID users around the PID is a key factor for success or trustworthiness, even more than techniques. PIDs are considered by the experts that we interviewed sociotechnical infrastructures, and it seems that trust in organizations or individuals is even more important for the acceptance of PIDs than the technique it uses because the techniques are perceived to be of amorphous risk.
And last thing I wanted to highlight is the implementation of PIDs, especially new PIDs, requires a strategic analysis. If this doesn't happen, there's a risk of fragmentation because you try to reinvent the wheel by establishing or building new PIDs that are already covered by services that are in place. So as I mentioned, this is the core output of our work, the recommendations and they are addressing I think a wide range of stakeholders, in fact eight stakeholder groups.
And today we want to highlight three stakeholder groups research funders, the RPOs and the publishers. So the recommendations addressing research funders are Make sure that you are represented or at least informed about national level coordination initiatives in the context of PIDs. This is some sort of presumption that there should be some sort of national level coordination initiative that compromise all the stakeholders that got an interest in PIDs.
Next recommendation is Be aware of what PIDs are relevant for your activity. For instance, PIDs that. are used in project proposal evaluations or for reporting on funded research outputs of our grant identification. Third point Consider assigning grant IDs to your grants whenever possible. This requires, of course, that there are human and also technical resources available to make this happen.
Consider requiring PIDs from funded researchers even for applicants to your funding calls, require them to use PIDs that identify data, publications, organizations, grants and so on. Be aware of developments around emerging PIDs that may be relevant to your area of activity, including PIDs for instruments, facilities, and PIDs for geo samples, so to say the emerging PIDs.
And of course, be aware of funder specific coordination initiatives nationally and internationally, promote them and join them when possible. Science Europe might be an interesting forum for these activities, for instance. Next set of recommendations addresses, institutions, research performing organizations. RPOs. First recommendation is the same as we can do for funders Make sure you are represented or at least informed about national level coordination initiatives.
Second recommendation is very important. Consider the possibility of drafting an institutional PID policy requiring researchers to use specific PIDs, at least the most common ones as an ORCID. Require your researchers to have an ORCID ID and use the ROR of your organization. Raise awareness of the existing and emerging PID landscape among your researchers, including prompting them to use the appropriate ones and be aware of the key role, of your own key role in the implementation of specific admin oriented PIDs.
Populate your CRIS systems, your human resource systems, and your institutional repositories with as many PIDs as possible. This will add incredible value to the services and to your organization. Be aware of technical. PIDs that are directly emerging from researcher communities in a bottom up fashion.
For instance, the PIDs for geo samples and stay informed about. still to come mechanisms to issue and share and use institutional PIDs such as research activity identifiers or PIDs for instruments. At the last set of recommendations we want to talk about addresses publishers. These are quite diverse in this perspective, a bit comparable to the research funders, as they got very different levels of technical capability and funding and so on.
And the first recommendatio is Ensure the long term availability of publications with a PID through agreements with long term archiving agencies or national libraries. And of course you should have exit policies in place stating you will notify the PID provider about the findability of publications in case of journal discontinuation so that resolving is maintained. We found a lot of PIDs that were once issued by publishers that do not resolve for living journals as well as for discontinued journals.
Include entries for additional PIDs in your manuscript submission systems, as these PIDs become more widely implemented, for instance, allow researchers to register ROR of their organizations, provide information snippets about why PIDs are important for authors who are not aware of the value of PIDs and be aware of the level of maturity of specific initiatives in order to allow reference to be included in manuscripts.
For instance, allow them, the authors to insert PID to geo samples. Make sure the PIDs you provide in your publications are operational and resolve correctly. This is also something that we found out is not always happening. And where these are available consider including pre-existing PIDs for preprints in the final research publication website along with the PID of the version of the record. Last recommendation addresses especially diamond OA publishers who often lack resources to fully implement a wide range of PIDs.
They should implement DOIs as a bare minimum and make use of initiatives like the Diamond OA Capacity Centre, support and join initiatives where best practices in the context of PIDs may be shared. So this was a short overview on the recommendations regarding three stakeholder groups, funders, RPOs and the publishers. You will find all recommendations, all the case studies, the analysis of the literature study and expert interviews, and the final report that is hopefully already published.
It should be published in early February, and this is the title and the DOI and it's got the title "Building the plane as we fly it - the promise of persistent identifiers". Well, I want to thank you for your attention, and I'm very sure you will enjoy the very interesting contributions from Jessica and Pablo. Thank you very much Ulrich for this overview of the report drafted by Scidecode consultants.
And let me ask Jessica Parland von Essen to come front, and I will introduce her. Jessica Parlande von Essen holds a PhD in history. She has worked as a librarian and she's currently development manager at CSC IT Center for science in Finland. She will explain what CSC IT center is.
She's currently also involved in the Project FAIRIMPACT and coordinating the PID forum in Finland. And she's also a member of the Knowledge Exchange group. So please, Jessica, the floor is yours. So thank you, Gaelle. So I would now like to say a few words about how I see this report and how I feel it can help me as a research data service provider on a national level in Finland and also on the level of the European open science cloud, which is also very interesting.
I think there are interesting things happening in the PD landscape in relation to the RSK. So about CSC. CSC is a Finnish state owned company, also partly owned by the higher education institutions. And so we are about 600 people working today, and our primary customers are the Ministry of Education and culture and the research performing organizations in Finland and also other government and administration institutions.
So as Finland is a very small country, we have a quite centralist structure, which is maybe a good thing when we are working with pids and research data questions. CSC is active in several international projects where a member of RSK RDA, we have a computing and supercomputing collaboration internationally and so forth. And we also have several service provisioning consortia.
And among these the Finnish ORCID and Eastside consortia, which we coordinate. And we also host and develop the National Research information hub, the research phi, and we host the National Research data management competence center and long term preservation services. And further more, I would like to add that has quite strong tradition of open science and research activities and coordinated national collaboration, also helped by, by our ministry.
So this is sort of a background and then a few thoughts maybe from the research data point of view and what the research or the persistent identifier landscape looks from. From my point of view, I see that there are really rising needs and requests for pids. And this partly, of course, comes from the. Implementation of the FAIR data principles, which I think are now reached quite nice maturity or at least awareness.
Still, I also see that there is often a gap between different use cases. This is the same thing as I think all I was talking about the researchers data management and workflow management and their needs in the data management process. And then on the other hand, the more policy maker like metadata integration or like Chris level information or like pids, so there's a sort of gap.
And sometimes the discussions I think seem a bit difficult because people come from a very from their own context. And there are so many, many different use cases and I think we need more discussions and yeah, still more analysis and discussions to have this better shared understanding. But our concepts are maybe not refined enough. So we need to, to keep discussing these things.
And especially, I think, listen to the researchers. And then it's also and I've really enjoyed following this work. For me, it was one of the maybe big insights was that there is actually a value in the diversity, so that we should actually be putting more and more focus on the internal world operability and trust, building like dimensions of this, that good governance is really what we need to aim at to have a resilient system.
So now I would like to talk about the National level recommendations that came out of this report. The first one is to identify the key stakeholders and start like discussions with them. And the second one is to explore the feasibility of discussing a shared strategy and implementation strategies with these stakeholders. Thirdly, to form a national level governance or some instrument or organizations for this.
The first recommendation is to be aware of the social technical solutions in place for various pids. So really be aware of what's out there and the differences and do not reinvent the wheel. And also raise awareness. So communication is really key here in building trust and awareness. So people can identify pids and know when and how to use them.
So I would now like to comment on this from the Finnish point of view and our context. And it was almost funny to see how well this aligned with what we have been working with in our small, small context in the National forum. So we also have seen that the data at an ORCID like consortia such this are not enough to have a solid and coherent good landscape. So for us, the research information hub is really an important place where we can agree on interoperability and use make up these agreements and rules and policies together.
This is really an important service in Finland as the higher educations, they get part of their funding based on this crisis reporting information. So they are really obliged to follow up and do this in a standardized way. So this is really a good thing for us. Discussing national strategy. Yes, we are currently writing the National party road map.
This has been ongoing for more than one year now, but it's ready and I will soon say some words about that. I would say that the special feature maybe in Finland has been that from the beginning I have had a very broad approach. So we included, like the government's interoperability services and land survey and National Archives and things to in this discussion. And yeah, and then we are also looking at somehow organizing the bid by the Forum Finland in a more like to have more mandate and logistics and Yeah we want to be open.
The fourth recommendation was to be aware of the sociotechnical technical solutions in place. The fifth was do not reinvent the wheel. And we really tried to appreciate existing practices. For instance, the land survey works with euros. And we need to live with that. And then we the communication is also important, according to us. So here is our road map and the recommendations for what they look like now.
So the first goal was actually this building trust and collaboration. And we have identified stakeholders and we are now discussing a recommendation recommending this policy that we write the National PID policy. And then the second recommendation is organizing the National PID infrastructure. And here we are actually trying to be thinking about making the PID policy actually more like a living document and a wiki page that it would.
So that it would like also include guidelines and lots of information about pids. But this is something we will discuss. And then we have had also identified this raising awareness and here we can use the existing open science collaborations. So then a few words about the iOS. The open European Science Cloud has been a big endeavor to make all the research infrastructures in Europe interoperable and Federated and make them easy, easy to use for research and work well together.
And this organization has just we have just founded the Association that then will actually be sort of a legal body to take responsibility of this. That has been like a series of projects. And now so now building is starting also because we of course, need these core services that can be this glue and provide the several features that are or services that are needed for achieving this interoperability.
And this AOT already has a bid policy and architecture and they are quite good, especially the PID policy gives. I think there's a nice set of, of descriptions of the responsibilities and so forth that are really helpful. The challenge here is that we have so many research communities that have already have their own cultures and ways of work working. And and it's really now important to, to be some like open and inclusive and try to make these systems more mature and interoperable.
So here are the course services that are now built in this core for iOS project. It started last June, and it's been going on for four, three years now, and it's coordinated by CSC. And here we have a PID graph. We actually have two research data graphs and then there is the PID meta resolver and we are also implementing the rate and level.
So you see that there's a lot happening here. Telco for iOS has a sister project for impact, and here CSC is responsible for work package three, which is the work package on pids. And here we are working with the policy side, the social side. So we are, for instance, setting up a coordination mechanism for the service providers and also find trying to find ways to implement the iOS PID policy and also find like user cases, use cases.
We have use cases with weak research infrastructures to find these requirements and also try to communicate them. There is a third element in the iOS universe that's highly relevant and it's the task force. So the iOS Association has task forces for different domains, and there is one for the PID policy implementation and this is mostly in-kind work.
So we are actually working very closely for impact and these projects with this, we hope to be able to help and provide information. But but this task force then works with. With this PID and questions in the ESC, and I think especially this core group of experts is really important for sharing the insights of this report, and also take it maybe further to different other bodies.
So for me, I think that this report is really valuable as in like sort of landscape review and analysis and there's nice mapping of stakeholders and stakeholders roles. So this, I think, can be very helpful. And I appreciate very much that it focuses on the social parts of the developing landscape, the use cases that are published are really good and helpful. So I think we are here really many good arguments for all stakeholders, I think to study and use and keep discussing, keep discussing.
So, so and also the recommendations and suggestions for next steps are, are valuable. So I'm really looking forward to the further discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jessica, for sharing the Finnish approach to the implementation of PIDs and also mentioning the EOSC project. I think we'll have some questions certainly on these two topics and I'm happy now to introduce Pablo de Castro who will be our last speaker.
Pablo is open access advocacy librarian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has worked with Open Aire and LIBER on gold open access for publishers. He also serves as Secretary for the EuroCris Association and is a member of EOSC task force on PID policy and implementation. And as you can see, he also works as a consultant with Scidecode consulting and in his spare time, he can give presentations for NISO.
So thank you very much, Pablo. Hi hello, everyone. Thank you, Gaelle, for the kind introduction and thank you for the invitation -- to you and NISO -- for being part of this session. I'm going to share my slides now. So what I will be kind of briefly talking about is one of the main risks that we have identified in the course of this project for the Knowledge Exchange around the PID landscape, namely the fragmentation or the current fragmentation of the PID landscape.
I will provide kind of three. examples of how this fragmentation is happening at the moment, some potential suggestions for tackling this fragmentation, which is perhaps not that useful. and a couple of suggestions at the end. So I'll start by mentioning the background for this analysis. Specifically on fragmentation it's provided by the interviews with experts that Ulrich mentioned earlier, the 16 interviews we carried out with experts in many different stakeholders and with different roles.
And then on the seven case studies that we have produced as part of this study. At the time of recording these studies, these case studies hadn't yet been published. Now they are available already. So they're roughly a week old. But they were summarised in this conference paper that the four members of the project team published mid-November last year.
And I can provide you a snapshot from that paper. Apologies for so much text on this slide. These are the seven case studies that provide a little bit the background for this analysis of the fragmentation or the current fragmentation of the PID landscape. I'll go briefly through the case studies So that you can see the various PIDs that we have looked into in some more detail as part of the case studies.
The first one is addressing the author IDs with an analysis of the adoption of the Dutch author identifier or DAI at a national level in the Netherlands before ORCID was even launched and its subsequent superseding by ORCIDs. So a really smooth example, I mean a good example for a smooth transition from a national-level author ID to a global one that could tackle these issues around fragmentation.
If we had national-level IDs for different countries, that would be a clear source of fragmentation. The second case study addresses organisational IDs where we have RORs and we have Ringgold's, and we have potentially multiple-level IDs as a goal. And again, perhaps the best example for the PID landscape fragmentation, we will see a bit more about this in a minute. Third case study addresses, PIDs for instruments and facilities an emerging one.
Fourth one reflects on the key role research funders are expected to play in the consolidation of the PID landscape. Specifically looking into Crossref DOI-based grant IDs issued by funders to identify their grants and also on Research Activity IDs handle-based identifiers issued by institutions to identify their projects. Again, a bit of a fragmentation there. Fifth case study deals with IGSNs or International Geo Sample Numbers as a kind of bottom-up, technical PID.
We will see more about technical versus admin-oriented PIDs in the next slide. Sixth case study looks into both author IDs and OrgIDs from the perspective of this Research Papers in Economics, this RePEc Author Service or RAS, which is an established, a very well-established community- driven PID for researchers in Economics and Business, which continues to thrive. Even if you have ORCIDs alongside and you have OrgIDs like ROR or Ringgold alongside Business, I mean, researchers in Economics still value the range of services that RePEc offers them, including the author identification and the organisational identification It's a really interesting case study.
And finally, the seventh one deals with failed PIDs and unreliable PID implementations In terms of failed PIDs, as Ulrich elaborated earlier it's DOIs that the case study specifically looks into or more deeply looked into, whereas for unreliable PID implementations, the example is PURLs. So this is the kind of context, the background for the analysis around the current PID landscape fragmentation.
The first aspect which I would like to look into is this what Ulrich called a "dichotomy" So these two broad categories of. PIDs that we have identified. We hope the classification might actually help. clarifying what the landscape looks like. We're talking in the report about technical PIDs, which you have examples for them at the bottom of this text. These are typically researcher-led, bottom-up PIDs in terms of their implementation with very little, if any, direct involvement in their implementation from stakeholders like research, performing organisations or RPOs or research funders or national offices or even publishers.
So these are things like PIDs for instruments and facilities or identifiers for geosamples or clinical trials or what I've roughly called biomedical IDs. So persistent identifiers for cells or aminoacids, the likes of GenBank [IDs]. So these are things that researchers try to standardise because they're using them because they need them for their research.
You need to properly identify an aminoacid if you're doing biomedical research. So that your fellow researchers will know what it is you're talking about. Funders, institutions, national offices and publishers are not aware of this. or if they are, they're not bringing them on their radar, so to speak. On the opposite corner, you have the admin-oriented PIDs in this kind of broad classification.
I mean, it's an approximate group. These ones comprise the PIDs that we are all more familiar with. So the DOIs for publications or for datasets, the ORCIDs for authors, the RORs, the Ringgold's for organisations, grant IDs, Research Activity IDs. So the usual ones. They're all admin-oriented PIDs in that they tend to be led normally in a top-down fashion.
So they tend to be kind of mandated. by stakeholders like national offices like institutions, publishers and some funders at least, all of whom are able to benefit from their use normally in terms of housekeeping. So if you want to keep your home in order, in terms of the research that is being conducted at your institution or the research that you are funding as a funder, all these identifiers are really, really useful.
The problem being that for researchers, if they are aware of them, which is not a given. So of course researchers know -- or most of them -- know anyway about ORCIDs because this ORCID is probably the most successful. together with DOIs, of course. but other than for publications, ORCID is the most successful and best consolidated identifier we have.
And there are lessons to learn from that, by the way. But I'm not sure researchers know about RORs or will see the value of using RORs in their research. [For] grant IDs we're doing early kind of attempts to persuade researchers to use. DOI grant IDs in their manuscript acknowledgments. it's been a kind of sweet-sour experience so far because, as mentioned in the footnotes, researchers will often see these admin-oriented PIDs as a burden, as an unwanted additional bureaucracy.
So what on Earth do I want a ROR for If I'm a researcher, why can't I directly write my affiliation? It's I mean, so there is a need to have advocacy strategies, communication strategies in place so that they will become aware of the benefits for them as well as for the other stakeholders. A second insight into this kind of fragmented PID landscape at present is the area of competing technical solutions.
So there is a number of areas, of entities when we talk about PIDs, where we have competing technical solutions in place. Right now, as mentioned in the corner of the slide, this is work in progress. and we have seen already the case study for the Dutch author identifier. This can be fixed in the medium-, long-term if the proper strategies and communication channels are in place.
The clearest example, in my view, for this issue of competing technical solutions takes place in the area of organisational identifiers, where we have two fairly well-consolidated solutions right now that are not mapped to each other. We have the ROR, the Research Organisation Registry which according to this screenshot on the slide. already includes over 100,000 organisations in the registry, and it's growing really quickly as well.
Whereas Ringold, which has recently been acquired by the Copyright Clearing Center, already includes more than 600,000 organisations in its database. So both of them are very solid, very well-used. Again, thinking about researchers, if research are a bit in two minds about using organisational IDs, if they learn that we have two of them, I really don't know what the reply might be to an institutional advocate like I am trying to persuade them of using one of them.
So Ideally this should these solutions should be mapped at least to each other or to a third one. going forward, I would say. In the area of author IDs we already mentioned the DAIs in the Netherlands versus ORCIDs. That was, again, a very successful example for tackling a potential fragmentation. And then we also mentioned the RePEc IDs for researchers in Economics, which is still there.
and again, as far as I know, I mean, it may well be the case that researchers in Economics have both a RePEc ID and an ORCID ID. It's probably the case, but you cannot link them to each other. So unless the researcher, him or herself, takes the effort to link them, there's no communication, as far as I know, between both initiatives. A third area is the area of grants and projects which are, of course, not exactly the same thing.
Grants come from funders, projects come from institutions, but they are very close from a conceptual viewpoint. And for grants we have, as mentioned earlier, the Crossref DOI-based grant IDs minted or issued by research funders versus the Research Activity IDs based on the handle technical solution issued by institutions for projects. Essentially, I mean, RAiDs could include a grant ID potentially, if there is one available.
at the moment, these initiatives are kind of at a very early stage, both of them. There is more info on the case study on the current stage of both developments, but there hasn't been much communication or best practice sharing yet on how to use them or how to use both of them. Finally, a fourth aspect in terms of competing technical solutions is a much more technical one, and it is the standard that we use to kind of implement whatever PID we're talking about.
So we have PIDs based on DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers or on handle IDs or URNs or ARKs. It's probably exaggerating a little bit, but pretty much every PID standard we have out there. so meaning entity covered by a PID is using a different technical standard for implementing it. So we saw grant IDs are using DOIs, handle IDs are the basis for RAiDs, which are essentially tackling the same.
Issue, so identifying projects or grants. National libraries, especially in Europe, places like Finland or Germany, are using URNs. ARKs are again very well-established. So we have a bit of an issue there. In terms of the siloes This is a kind of general comment for all the cases I'm going through and Ideally it should be possible to resolve any PID based on any of these technical standards I've listed in the fourth bullet point.
So this is something that is already happening. So the best among these four areas of competing technical solutions, the best one, the one that is being most successfully addressed right now is the fourth one regarding the various technical standards that can be used for defining a PID. There is this project mainly in the US there's a couple of European partners as well in there, but it's mostly as highlighted on the.
on the slide, this Name to Thing or N2T project is a scheme-agnostic resolver So Jessica already talked about a meta-resolver earlier. So it's a scheme-agnostic resolver that currently works for over 900 types of identifier, including ARKs, DOIs, handles, PURLs, URNs, ORCIDs ISSNs, etcetera meaning that it's indeed possible to resolve anything with the resolver that this project has built. As Jessica has mentioned, there is another example for these core components of the EOSC FAIRCORE4EOSC project coordinated from the CSC in Helsinki.
One of the key goals of the FAIRCORE4EOSC project is to build this EOSC PID meta-resolver to offer users a single PID-resolving API in which any kind of PID can be resolved through a single scalable PID-resolving infrastructure. So we are getting there, at least for this kind of basic. technical compatibility for the various standards that can underpin a given PID. It's, I mean, we could hope that this gradual solving of the siloing issues could also reach the other areas.
So the third and final aspect I wanted to address in terms of the fragmented, the currently fragmented PID landscape is this concept of community, which as said on the slide is ambiguous to say the least, and also difficult to manage. So we often say, we often talk about community-driven implementation without specifying what it is we mean by community. Or we also read frequently this sentence PIDs and services associated with them need to be perceived as valuable and be in turn promoted by "the community", quote unquote, the community.
meaning quite a lot of different stakeholders. You have, at least on the right-hand side of the slide, there's a lot of relevant stakeholders working in the PID implementation area, not always talking to each other and not always aware of what each other is doing. We have collected a few examples of the various stakeholders involved in, for instance, Crossref DOI-based grant ID issuing by research funders.
So who plays what PID role in that specific process of minting grant IDs? It's not all the stakeholders listed here. All of them are proving really valuable and delivering very valuable inputs into the development of the PID landscape. But there is a bit of siloing there again in the lack of awareness of what others are doing and the risk of reinventing the wheel.
I wanted to focus on the last item on the list of community stakeholders, which is start-ups, because there is a start-up in California at the University of California San Diego, called SciCrunch. It's a spin-off from UCSD. minting these RRIDs that are little known in Europe at least, although as you can see, it's addressing a lot of identifiers, mostly for in the area of technical IDs.
as per the classification I went through earlier. So trying to identify all these biomedical research- related biosamples, antibodies, aminoacids, etc., but it also includes, for instance. instruments and facilities. It's a small start-up, but it's really successful in what they're doing because they're using artificial intelligence, essentially to text-mine publications and identify the references to entities that can be assigned a persistent identifier.
So this is a very good example for this African proverb. If you want to go there quick, go alone, If you want to go far, go together. Because I'm not sure many people know about SciCrunch. It's quite impressive what they're doing, but it's very important that they become part of a wider conversation so that everyone can learn from everyone else's lessons.
So again, just an example for the issue of fragmentation in the community. So finally two recommendations from the PID study to improve this area and specifically the coordination of various initiatives and stakeholders. The first one is a PID Federation and/or a PID Observatory. This is hardly our idea as a team. There is this publication that I'm posting on the slide from September 2020, so it's a few years old already, published within the FREYA EU-funded project by Josh Brown, exploring what a PID Federation might entail, what governance mechanism it might have.
There hasn't been too much progress since this was published around the concept of a PID Federation. It definitely doesn't exist at the time, but we have included recommendations for a PID Federation in the final report because it would be an excellent coordination mechanism with or without the PID Observatory, which is a slightly different idea for putting together some sort of.
online resource collecting as much information as possible on what's going on in the wider area of PID implementation for all these PIDs. All these initiatives, stakeholders, everything there. so that anyone can look inside it and find what's going on where. And the second and final recommendation for, I mean, to address this fragmentation is to find out a mechanism, to find out a framework to resume the PIDapalooza series of events that started in 2016 in Reykjavik, in Iceland, and were being held annually until 2021.
But then, as mentioned in this brief message by Alice Meadows, there was never any PIDapalooza conference or unconference in 2022, so we haven't had any more PIDapaloozas. The last one was in Lisbon, in Portugal in 2021, and it's sorely missed. I would say we need some kind of forum where a conversation can take place, NISO notwithstanding I would say. So it's.
It's a. It's a need, it's a much-welcome opportunity for discussing but having the opportunity to. have the different stakeholders, the different countries represented in a programme. to share, to discuss what each of them are doing is irreplaceable. So these are the two kind of main suggestions that we might have.
I'd love to hear what your thoughts might be around this. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Pablo, for this focus on the fragmentation of the PID landscape. I'm certain this will trigger many questions from the audience, so please stay with us because we'll have a Q&A following this session. And I want to thank, of course, Pablo, Jessica and Ulrich, who will be with us to answer your questions.
Thank you very much.
Segment:0 .
Good morning.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NISO Plus 2023. I'm Gaelle Bequet. I'm the director of the ISSN International Center in Paris, France. And thank you very much for joining us today. Our session has a very long title, starting with risk and trust. I think we can shorten this and title it it risk and trust for identifiers in academia.
I think that's a bit better. It rings better. Anyway, I will give a brief introduction about the context of our presentations today. NISO organized a brainstorming session last September to identify areas of metadata that are of common concern to librarians, publishers and service providers. And three core topics were actually debated structures, exchange of metadata and identifiers.
So I was participating or attending this brainstorming session, and I suggested to hold a session about a study which has been commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange group. This study started in 2021 and the consulting company Scidecode was actually awarded and selected to put this study together or write this study that will be published early February.
You can find the scoping document in Zenodo and the aim of this study was to identify what might be the best possible strategic and operational recommendations to achieve a well functioning PID infrastructure in Europe and beyond. So we're going to hear and listen to our consultants from Scidecode who actually wrote the final report and to a member of Knowledge Exchange group who has participated in the drafting of the scoping document.
So I'm very happy to welcome our three speakers today, starting with Ulrich Herb. Who will give The first presentation. So let me introduce Ulrich. Ulrich Herb is head of the publication and research support department at Saarland University in Germany, He is a sociologist and information scientist, He is also a member of the learned society for information science in the German speaking countries, He is also an associate consultant with Scidecode consulting company.
So, Ulrich, the floor is yours. OK so thanks, Gaelle, for this very polite introduction. And I will give the first presentation about the study on risk and trust in pursuit of a well-functioning, persistent identifier infrastructure, we at scidecode did. And as Gaelle already outlined, the study was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, which is a collaboration between six National Research organizations from Finland, France, Denmark, Germany, UK and the Netherlands with the aim of supporting the use and development of ICT infrastructures for education and research.
As Gaelle also mentioned, the aim of the study was to identify through investigation, analysis and recommendations what could be the best possible strategic and operational paths to achieve for well-functioning PID infrastructure. And KE emphasized a bit on the issues of risk and trust without narrowing it down to technical infrastructures, but also to social components of such infrastructure.
This is the team that did the study. It's a team consisting of the associates of scidecode science consulting, it's Pablo de Castro who will also give a presentation later, it's Laura Rothfritz and me and Joachim Schöpfel as an external partnering consultant. What did we do? An analysis of the current state of the PID landscape in the six key partner countries with the focus on e-infrastructure, focused on the currently available PIDs, for instance for researchers as ORCID or institutional ones as RORs and so on, ut also on new or emerging PIDs as PIDs for conferences or research equipment, facilities or geo samples and so on.
First step was a literature study, followed by expert interviews and the analysis of both fed into the construction of seven case studies which highlighted the issues of risk and trust in the PID infrastructure, Pablo will tell a little bit more about these case studies, and also into the formulation of recommendation for good practice and the best opportunities for achieving a trustworthy and well functioning PID infrastructure. This list of the 18 experts we interviewed, we did 16 interviews.
So two interviews were joint interviews with two partners. And as you see, we tried to cover a wide range of professional backgrounds with the interviewees and a wide range of PID roles. So we did interviews with people from, from National Research and education networks, research funders, libraries, PID service providers, PID users and so on to capture a whole picture of what's going on and what are the issues of risk and trust within this PID infrastructure.
So we got some very selective findings from these interviews before we go on to the recommendations, which are the core of the outputs we produced. These experts predominantly mentioned well-established PIDs that everyone knows more or less as DOIs or ORCID or ROR and they mentioned to a lesser extent emerging PIDs for funders, grants, research activity IDs or Confiderence IDs and also standards like URNs or schemes like ARK. The main benefits that these experts saw in or discovered in PIDs was their interoperability or value added services that can be built on top of these and the availability and interconnectivity of rich meta data associated with the PIDs.
We also found the dichotomy of, so to say, technical bottom up researcher-driven PIDs as, for instance, PIDs for geo samples or research activity IDs, and the more or less admin oriented PIDs, which are more or less top down PIDs with an uptake that's driven by institutions, publishers, research funders, for instance ORCID or ROR, these serve more or less organizational driven demands.
And one thing that was especially important for risk and trust and reliability was open source and open data. Because these two elements allow to rebuild a service that has been discontinued or that failed or that ceased to exist, rebuilt this from scratch by using open source and open data through community engagement. And this is also the next point.
The existence of a community of PID users around the PID is a key factor for success or trustworthiness, even more than techniques. PIDs are considered by the experts that we interviewed sociotechnical infrastructures, and it seems that trust in organizations or individuals is even more important for the acceptance of PIDs than the technique it uses because the techniques are perceived to be of amorphous risk.
And last thing I wanted to highlight is the implementation of PIDs, especially new PIDs, requires a strategic analysis. If this doesn't happen, there's a risk of fragmentation because you try to reinvent the wheel by establishing or building new PIDs that are already covered by services that are in place. So as I mentioned, this is the core output of our work, the recommendations and they are addressing I think a wide range of stakeholders, in fact eight stakeholder groups.
And today we want to highlight three stakeholder groups research funders, the RPOs and the publishers. So the recommendations addressing research funders are Make sure that you are represented or at least informed about national level coordination initiatives in the context of PIDs. This is some sort of presumption that there should be some sort of national level coordination initiative that compromise all the stakeholders that got an interest in PIDs.
Next recommendation is Be aware of what PIDs are relevant for your activity. For instance, PIDs that. are used in project proposal evaluations or for reporting on funded research outputs of our grant identification. Third point Consider assigning grant IDs to your grants whenever possible. This requires, of course, that there are human and also technical resources available to make this happen.
Consider requiring PIDs from funded researchers even for applicants to your funding calls, require them to use PIDs that identify data, publications, organizations, grants and so on. Be aware of developments around emerging PIDs that may be relevant to your area of activity, including PIDs for instruments, facilities, and PIDs for geo samples, so to say the emerging PIDs.
And of course, be aware of funder specific coordination initiatives nationally and internationally, promote them and join them when possible. Science Europe might be an interesting forum for these activities, for instance. Next set of recommendations addresses, institutions, research performing organizations. RPOs. First recommendation is the same as we can do for funders Make sure you are represented or at least informed about national level coordination initiatives.
Second recommendation is very important. Consider the possibility of drafting an institutional PID policy requiring researchers to use specific PIDs, at least the most common ones as an ORCID. Require your researchers to have an ORCID ID and use the ROR of your organization. Raise awareness of the existing and emerging PID landscape among your researchers, including prompting them to use the appropriate ones and be aware of the key role, of your own key role in the implementation of specific admin oriented PIDs.
Populate your CRIS systems, your human resource systems, and your institutional repositories with as many PIDs as possible. This will add incredible value to the services and to your organization. Be aware of technical. PIDs that are directly emerging from researcher communities in a bottom up fashion.
For instance, the PIDs for geo samples and stay informed about. still to come mechanisms to issue and share and use institutional PIDs such as research activity identifiers or PIDs for instruments. At the last set of recommendations we want to talk about addresses publishers. These are quite diverse in this perspective, a bit comparable to the research funders, as they got very different levels of technical capability and funding and so on.
And the first recommendatio is Ensure the long term availability of publications with a PID through agreements with long term archiving agencies or national libraries. And of course you should have exit policies in place stating you will notify the PID provider about the findability of publications in case of journal discontinuation so that resolving is maintained. We found a lot of PIDs that were once issued by publishers that do not resolve for living journals as well as for discontinued journals.
Include entries for additional PIDs in your manuscript submission systems, as these PIDs become more widely implemented, for instance, allow researchers to register ROR of their organizations, provide information snippets about why PIDs are important for authors who are not aware of the value of PIDs and be aware of the level of maturity of specific initiatives in order to allow reference to be included in manuscripts.
For instance, allow them, the authors to insert PID to geo samples. Make sure the PIDs you provide in your publications are operational and resolve correctly. This is also something that we found out is not always happening. And where these are available consider including pre-existing PIDs for preprints in the final research publication website along with the PID of the version of the record. Last recommendation addresses especially diamond OA publishers who often lack resources to fully implement a wide range of PIDs.
They should implement DOIs as a bare minimum and make use of initiatives like the Diamond OA Capacity Centre, support and join initiatives where best practices in the context of PIDs may be shared. So this was a short overview on the recommendations regarding three stakeholder groups, funders, RPOs and the publishers. You will find all recommendations, all the case studies, the analysis of the literature study and expert interviews, and the final report that is hopefully already published.
It should be published in early February, and this is the title and the DOI and it's got the title "Building the plane as we fly it - the promise of persistent identifiers". Well, I want to thank you for your attention, and I'm very sure you will enjoy the very interesting contributions from Jessica and Pablo. Thank you very much Ulrich for this overview of the report drafted by Scidecode consultants.
And let me ask Jessica Parland von Essen to come front, and I will introduce her. Jessica Parlande von Essen holds a PhD in history. She has worked as a librarian and she's currently development manager at CSC IT Center for science in Finland. She will explain what CSC IT center is.
She's currently also involved in the Project FAIRIMPACT and coordinating the PID forum in Finland. And she's also a member of the Knowledge Exchange group. So please, Jessica, the floor is yours. So thank you, Gaelle. So I would now like to say a few words about how I see this report and how I feel it can help me as a research data service provider on a national level in Finland and also on the level of the European open science cloud, which is also very interesting.
I think there are interesting things happening in the PD landscape in relation to the RSK. So about CSC. CSC is a Finnish state owned company, also partly owned by the higher education institutions. And so we are about 600 people working today, and our primary customers are the Ministry of Education and culture and the research performing organizations in Finland and also other government and administration institutions.
So as Finland is a very small country, we have a quite centralist structure, which is maybe a good thing when we are working with pids and research data questions. CSC is active in several international projects where a member of RSK RDA, we have a computing and supercomputing collaboration internationally and so forth. And we also have several service provisioning consortia.
And among these the Finnish ORCID and Eastside consortia, which we coordinate. And we also host and develop the National Research information hub, the research phi, and we host the National Research data management competence center and long term preservation services. And further more, I would like to add that has quite strong tradition of open science and research activities and coordinated national collaboration, also helped by, by our ministry.
So this is sort of a background and then a few thoughts maybe from the research data point of view and what the research or the persistent identifier landscape looks from. From my point of view, I see that there are really rising needs and requests for pids. And this partly, of course, comes from the. Implementation of the FAIR data principles, which I think are now reached quite nice maturity or at least awareness.
Still, I also see that there is often a gap between different use cases. This is the same thing as I think all I was talking about the researchers data management and workflow management and their needs in the data management process. And then on the other hand, the more policy maker like metadata integration or like Chris level information or like pids, so there's a sort of gap.
And sometimes the discussions I think seem a bit difficult because people come from a very from their own context. And there are so many, many different use cases and I think we need more discussions and yeah, still more analysis and discussions to have this better shared understanding. But our concepts are maybe not refined enough. So we need to, to keep discussing these things.
And especially, I think, listen to the researchers. And then it's also and I've really enjoyed following this work. For me, it was one of the maybe big insights was that there is actually a value in the diversity, so that we should actually be putting more and more focus on the internal world operability and trust, building like dimensions of this, that good governance is really what we need to aim at to have a resilient system.
So now I would like to talk about the National level recommendations that came out of this report. The first one is to identify the key stakeholders and start like discussions with them. And the second one is to explore the feasibility of discussing a shared strategy and implementation strategies with these stakeholders. Thirdly, to form a national level governance or some instrument or organizations for this.
The first recommendation is to be aware of the social technical solutions in place for various pids. So really be aware of what's out there and the differences and do not reinvent the wheel. And also raise awareness. So communication is really key here in building trust and awareness. So people can identify pids and know when and how to use them.
So I would now like to comment on this from the Finnish point of view and our context. And it was almost funny to see how well this aligned with what we have been working with in our small, small context in the National forum. So we also have seen that the data at an ORCID like consortia such this are not enough to have a solid and coherent good landscape. So for us, the research information hub is really an important place where we can agree on interoperability and use make up these agreements and rules and policies together.
This is really an important service in Finland as the higher educations, they get part of their funding based on this crisis reporting information. So they are really obliged to follow up and do this in a standardized way. So this is really a good thing for us. Discussing national strategy. Yes, we are currently writing the National party road map.
This has been ongoing for more than one year now, but it's ready and I will soon say some words about that. I would say that the special feature maybe in Finland has been that from the beginning I have had a very broad approach. So we included, like the government's interoperability services and land survey and National Archives and things to in this discussion. And yeah, and then we are also looking at somehow organizing the bid by the Forum Finland in a more like to have more mandate and logistics and Yeah we want to be open.
The fourth recommendation was to be aware of the sociotechnical technical solutions in place. The fifth was do not reinvent the wheel. And we really tried to appreciate existing practices. For instance, the land survey works with euros. And we need to live with that. And then we the communication is also important, according to us. So here is our road map and the recommendations for what they look like now.
So the first goal was actually this building trust and collaboration. And we have identified stakeholders and we are now discussing a recommendation recommending this policy that we write the National PID policy. And then the second recommendation is organizing the National PID infrastructure. And here we are actually trying to be thinking about making the PID policy actually more like a living document and a wiki page that it would.
So that it would like also include guidelines and lots of information about pids. But this is something we will discuss. And then we have had also identified this raising awareness and here we can use the existing open science collaborations. So then a few words about the iOS. The open European Science Cloud has been a big endeavor to make all the research infrastructures in Europe interoperable and Federated and make them easy, easy to use for research and work well together.
And this organization has just we have just founded the Association that then will actually be sort of a legal body to take responsibility of this. That has been like a series of projects. And now so now building is starting also because we of course, need these core services that can be this glue and provide the several features that are or services that are needed for achieving this interoperability.
And this AOT already has a bid policy and architecture and they are quite good, especially the PID policy gives. I think there's a nice set of, of descriptions of the responsibilities and so forth that are really helpful. The challenge here is that we have so many research communities that have already have their own cultures and ways of work working. And and it's really now important to, to be some like open and inclusive and try to make these systems more mature and interoperable.
So here are the course services that are now built in this core for iOS project. It started last June, and it's been going on for four, three years now, and it's coordinated by CSC. And here we have a PID graph. We actually have two research data graphs and then there is the PID meta resolver and we are also implementing the rate and level.
So you see that there's a lot happening here. Telco for iOS has a sister project for impact, and here CSC is responsible for work package three, which is the work package on pids. And here we are working with the policy side, the social side. So we are, for instance, setting up a coordination mechanism for the service providers and also find trying to find ways to implement the iOS PID policy and also find like user cases, use cases.
We have use cases with weak research infrastructures to find these requirements and also try to communicate them. There is a third element in the iOS universe that's highly relevant and it's the task force. So the iOS Association has task forces for different domains, and there is one for the PID policy implementation and this is mostly in-kind work.
So we are actually working very closely for impact and these projects with this, we hope to be able to help and provide information. But but this task force then works with. With this PID and questions in the ESC, and I think especially this core group of experts is really important for sharing the insights of this report, and also take it maybe further to different other bodies.
So for me, I think that this report is really valuable as in like sort of landscape review and analysis and there's nice mapping of stakeholders and stakeholders roles. So this, I think, can be very helpful. And I appreciate very much that it focuses on the social parts of the developing landscape, the use cases that are published are really good and helpful. So I think we are here really many good arguments for all stakeholders, I think to study and use and keep discussing, keep discussing.
So, so and also the recommendations and suggestions for next steps are, are valuable. So I'm really looking forward to the further discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jessica, for sharing the Finnish approach to the implementation of PIDs and also mentioning the EOSC project. I think we'll have some questions certainly on these two topics and I'm happy now to introduce Pablo de Castro who will be our last speaker.
Pablo is open access advocacy librarian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has worked with Open Aire and LIBER on gold open access for publishers. He also serves as Secretary for the EuroCris Association and is a member of EOSC task force on PID policy and implementation. And as you can see, he also works as a consultant with Scidecode consulting and in his spare time, he can give presentations for NISO.
So thank you very much, Pablo. Hi hello, everyone. Thank you, Gaelle, for the kind introduction and thank you for the invitation -- to you and NISO -- for being part of this session. I'm going to share my slides now. So what I will be kind of briefly talking about is one of the main risks that we have identified in the course of this project for the Knowledge Exchange around the PID landscape, namely the fragmentation or the current fragmentation of the PID landscape.
I will provide kind of three. examples of how this fragmentation is happening at the moment, some potential suggestions for tackling this fragmentation, which is perhaps not that useful. and a couple of suggestions at the end. So I'll start by mentioning the background for this analysis. Specifically on fragmentation it's provided by the interviews with experts that Ulrich mentioned earlier, the 16 interviews we carried out with experts in many different stakeholders and with different roles.
And then on the seven case studies that we have produced as part of this study. At the time of recording these studies, these case studies hadn't yet been published. Now they are available already. So they're roughly a week old. But they were summarised in this conference paper that the four members of the project team published mid-November last year.
And I can provide you a snapshot from that paper. Apologies for so much text on this slide. These are the seven case studies that provide a little bit the background for this analysis of the fragmentation or the current fragmentation of the PID landscape. I'll go briefly through the case studies So that you can see the various PIDs that we have looked into in some more detail as part of the case studies.
The first one is addressing the author IDs with an analysis of the adoption of the Dutch author identifier or DAI at a national level in the Netherlands before ORCID was even launched and its subsequent superseding by ORCIDs. So a really smooth example, I mean a good example for a smooth transition from a national-level author ID to a global one that could tackle these issues around fragmentation.
If we had national-level IDs for different countries, that would be a clear source of fragmentation. The second case study addresses organisational IDs where we have RORs and we have Ringgold's, and we have potentially multiple-level IDs as a goal. And again, perhaps the best example for the PID landscape fragmentation, we will see a bit more about this in a minute. Third case study addresses, PIDs for instruments and facilities an emerging one.
Fourth one reflects on the key role research funders are expected to play in the consolidation of the PID landscape. Specifically looking into Crossref DOI-based grant IDs issued by funders to identify their grants and also on Research Activity IDs handle-based identifiers issued by institutions to identify their projects. Again, a bit of a fragmentation there. Fifth case study deals with IGSNs or International Geo Sample Numbers as a kind of bottom-up, technical PID.
We will see more about technical versus admin-oriented PIDs in the next slide. Sixth case study looks into both author IDs and OrgIDs from the perspective of this Research Papers in Economics, this RePEc Author Service or RAS, which is an established, a very well-established community- driven PID for researchers in Economics and Business, which continues to thrive. Even if you have ORCIDs alongside and you have OrgIDs like ROR or Ringgold alongside Business, I mean, researchers in Economics still value the range of services that RePEc offers them, including the author identification and the organisational identification It's a really interesting case study.
And finally, the seventh one deals with failed PIDs and unreliable PID implementations In terms of failed PIDs, as Ulrich elaborated earlier it's DOIs that the case study specifically looks into or more deeply looked into, whereas for unreliable PID implementations, the example is PURLs. So this is the kind of context, the background for the analysis around the current PID landscape fragmentation.
The first aspect which I would like to look into is this what Ulrich called a "dichotomy" So these two broad categories of. PIDs that we have identified. We hope the classification might actually help. clarifying what the landscape looks like. We're talking in the report about technical PIDs, which you have examples for them at the bottom of this text. These are typically researcher-led, bottom-up PIDs in terms of their implementation with very little, if any, direct involvement in their implementation from stakeholders like research, performing organisations or RPOs or research funders or national offices or even publishers.
So these are things like PIDs for instruments and facilities or identifiers for geosamples or clinical trials or what I've roughly called biomedical IDs. So persistent identifiers for cells or aminoacids, the likes of GenBank [IDs]. So these are things that researchers try to standardise because they're using them because they need them for their research.
You need to properly identify an aminoacid if you're doing biomedical research. So that your fellow researchers will know what it is you're talking about. Funders, institutions, national offices and publishers are not aware of this. or if they are, they're not bringing them on their radar, so to speak. On the opposite corner, you have the admin-oriented PIDs in this kind of broad classification.
I mean, it's an approximate group. These ones comprise the PIDs that we are all more familiar with. So the DOIs for publications or for datasets, the ORCIDs for authors, the RORs, the Ringgold's for organisations, grant IDs, Research Activity IDs. So the usual ones. They're all admin-oriented PIDs in that they tend to be led normally in a top-down fashion.
So they tend to be kind of mandated. by stakeholders like national offices like institutions, publishers and some funders at least, all of whom are able to benefit from their use normally in terms of housekeeping. So if you want to keep your home in order, in terms of the research that is being conducted at your institution or the research that you are funding as a funder, all these identifiers are really, really useful.
The problem being that for researchers, if they are aware of them, which is not a given. So of course researchers know -- or most of them -- know anyway about ORCIDs because this ORCID is probably the most successful. together with DOIs, of course. but other than for publications, ORCID is the most successful and best consolidated identifier we have.
And there are lessons to learn from that, by the way. But I'm not sure researchers know about RORs or will see the value of using RORs in their research. [For] grant IDs we're doing early kind of attempts to persuade researchers to use. DOI grant IDs in their manuscript acknowledgments. it's been a kind of sweet-sour experience so far because, as mentioned in the footnotes, researchers will often see these admin-oriented PIDs as a burden, as an unwanted additional bureaucracy.
So what on Earth do I want a ROR for If I'm a researcher, why can't I directly write my affiliation? It's I mean, so there is a need to have advocacy strategies, communication strategies in place so that they will become aware of the benefits for them as well as for the other stakeholders. A second insight into this kind of fragmented PID landscape at present is the area of competing technical solutions.
So there is a number of areas, of entities when we talk about PIDs, where we have competing technical solutions in place. Right now, as mentioned in the corner of the slide, this is work in progress. and we have seen already the case study for the Dutch author identifier. This can be fixed in the medium-, long-term if the proper strategies and communication channels are in place.
The clearest example, in my view, for this issue of competing technical solutions takes place in the area of organisational identifiers, where we have two fairly well-consolidated solutions right now that are not mapped to each other. We have the ROR, the Research Organisation Registry which according to this screenshot on the slide. already includes over 100,000 organisations in the registry, and it's growing really quickly as well.
Whereas Ringold, which has recently been acquired by the Copyright Clearing Center, already includes more than 600,000 organisations in its database. So both of them are very solid, very well-used. Again, thinking about researchers, if research are a bit in two minds about using organisational IDs, if they learn that we have two of them, I really don't know what the reply might be to an institutional advocate like I am trying to persuade them of using one of them.
So Ideally this should these solutions should be mapped at least to each other or to a third one. going forward, I would say. In the area of author IDs we already mentioned the DAIs in the Netherlands versus ORCIDs. That was, again, a very successful example for tackling a potential fragmentation. And then we also mentioned the RePEc IDs for researchers in Economics, which is still there.
and again, as far as I know, I mean, it may well be the case that researchers in Economics have both a RePEc ID and an ORCID ID. It's probably the case, but you cannot link them to each other. So unless the researcher, him or herself, takes the effort to link them, there's no communication, as far as I know, between both initiatives. A third area is the area of grants and projects which are, of course, not exactly the same thing.
Grants come from funders, projects come from institutions, but they are very close from a conceptual viewpoint. And for grants we have, as mentioned earlier, the Crossref DOI-based grant IDs minted or issued by research funders versus the Research Activity IDs based on the handle technical solution issued by institutions for projects. Essentially, I mean, RAiDs could include a grant ID potentially, if there is one available.
at the moment, these initiatives are kind of at a very early stage, both of them. There is more info on the case study on the current stage of both developments, but there hasn't been much communication or best practice sharing yet on how to use them or how to use both of them. Finally, a fourth aspect in terms of competing technical solutions is a much more technical one, and it is the standard that we use to kind of implement whatever PID we're talking about.
So we have PIDs based on DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers or on handle IDs or URNs or ARKs. It's probably exaggerating a little bit, but pretty much every PID standard we have out there. so meaning entity covered by a PID is using a different technical standard for implementing it. So we saw grant IDs are using DOIs, handle IDs are the basis for RAiDs, which are essentially tackling the same.
Issue, so identifying projects or grants. National libraries, especially in Europe, places like Finland or Germany, are using URNs. ARKs are again very well-established. So we have a bit of an issue there. In terms of the siloes This is a kind of general comment for all the cases I'm going through and Ideally it should be possible to resolve any PID based on any of these technical standards I've listed in the fourth bullet point.
So this is something that is already happening. So the best among these four areas of competing technical solutions, the best one, the one that is being most successfully addressed right now is the fourth one regarding the various technical standards that can be used for defining a PID. There is this project mainly in the US there's a couple of European partners as well in there, but it's mostly as highlighted on the.
on the slide, this Name to Thing or N2T project is a scheme-agnostic resolver So Jessica already talked about a meta-resolver earlier. So it's a scheme-agnostic resolver that currently works for over 900 types of identifier, including ARKs, DOIs, handles, PURLs, URNs, ORCIDs ISSNs, etcetera meaning that it's indeed possible to resolve anything with the resolver that this project has built. As Jessica has mentioned, there is another example for these core components of the EOSC FAIRCORE4EOSC project coordinated from the CSC in Helsinki.
One of the key goals of the FAIRCORE4EOSC project is to build this EOSC PID meta-resolver to offer users a single PID-resolving API in which any kind of PID can be resolved through a single scalable PID-resolving infrastructure. So we are getting there, at least for this kind of basic. technical compatibility for the various standards that can underpin a given PID. It's, I mean, we could hope that this gradual solving of the siloing issues could also reach the other areas.
So the third and final aspect I wanted to address in terms of the fragmented, the currently fragmented PID landscape is this concept of community, which as said on the slide is ambiguous to say the least, and also difficult to manage. So we often say, we often talk about community-driven implementation without specifying what it is we mean by community. Or we also read frequently this sentence PIDs and services associated with them need to be perceived as valuable and be in turn promoted by "the community", quote unquote, the community.
meaning quite a lot of different stakeholders. You have, at least on the right-hand side of the slide, there's a lot of relevant stakeholders working in the PID implementation area, not always talking to each other and not always aware of what each other is doing. We have collected a few examples of the various stakeholders involved in, for instance, Crossref DOI-based grant ID issuing by research funders.
So who plays what PID role in that specific process of minting grant IDs? It's not all the stakeholders listed here. All of them are proving really valuable and delivering very valuable inputs into the development of the PID landscape. But there is a bit of siloing there again in the lack of awareness of what others are doing and the risk of reinventing the wheel.
I wanted to focus on the last item on the list of community stakeholders, which is start-ups, because there is a start-up in California at the University of California San Diego, called SciCrunch. It's a spin-off from UCSD. minting these RRIDs that are little known in Europe at least, although as you can see, it's addressing a lot of identifiers, mostly for in the area of technical IDs.
as per the classification I went through earlier. So trying to identify all these biomedical research- related biosamples, antibodies, aminoacids, etc., but it also includes, for instance. instruments and facilities. It's a small start-up, but it's really successful in what they're doing because they're using artificial intelligence, essentially to text-mine publications and identify the references to entities that can be assigned a persistent identifier.
So this is a very good example for this African proverb. If you want to go there quick, go alone, If you want to go far, go together. Because I'm not sure many people know about SciCrunch. It's quite impressive what they're doing, but it's very important that they become part of a wider conversation so that everyone can learn from everyone else's lessons.
So again, just an example for the issue of fragmentation in the community. So finally two recommendations from the PID study to improve this area and specifically the coordination of various initiatives and stakeholders. The first one is a PID Federation and/or a PID Observatory. This is hardly our idea as a team. There is this publication that I'm posting on the slide from September 2020, so it's a few years old already, published within the FREYA EU-funded project by Josh Brown, exploring what a PID Federation might entail, what governance mechanism it might have.
There hasn't been too much progress since this was published around the concept of a PID Federation. It definitely doesn't exist at the time, but we have included recommendations for a PID Federation in the final report because it would be an excellent coordination mechanism with or without the PID Observatory, which is a slightly different idea for putting together some sort of.
online resource collecting as much information as possible on what's going on in the wider area of PID implementation for all these PIDs. All these initiatives, stakeholders, everything there. so that anyone can look inside it and find what's going on where. And the second and final recommendation for, I mean, to address this fragmentation is to find out a mechanism, to find out a framework to resume the PIDapalooza series of events that started in 2016 in Reykjavik, in Iceland, and were being held annually until 2021.
But then, as mentioned in this brief message by Alice Meadows, there was never any PIDapalooza conference or unconference in 2022, so we haven't had any more PIDapaloozas. The last one was in Lisbon, in Portugal in 2021, and it's sorely missed. I would say we need some kind of forum where a conversation can take place, NISO notwithstanding I would say. So it's.
It's a. It's a need, it's a much-welcome opportunity for discussing but having the opportunity to. have the different stakeholders, the different countries represented in a programme. to share, to discuss what each of them are doing is irreplaceable. So these are the two kind of main suggestions that we might have.
I'd love to hear what your thoughts might be around this. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Pablo, for this focus on the fragmentation of the PID landscape. I'm certain this will trigger many questions from the audience, so please stay with us because we'll have a Q&A following this session. And I want to thank, of course, Pablo, Jessica and Ulrich, who will be with us to answer your questions.
Thank you very much.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode