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National PID strategies and what they mean for the NISO community Recording
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National PID strategies and what they mean for the NISO community Recording
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Segment:0 .
ALICE MEADOWS: Hi, everyone and welcome to this session on National PID strategies and what they mean for the information community.
ALICE MEADOWS: I'm delighted to have with me here four wonderful speakers from all around the world.
ALICE MEADOWS: We have John Aspler from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, who manages the Canadian PID community. We have Christopher Brown from Jisc, who's a product manager, where he leads on PID projects. We have Linda O'Brien, a board director and consultant who recently stepped down as director of the ORCID board. And we have Washington Segundo from IBICT, the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology.
ALICE MEADOWS: They are each going to do a brief presentation
ALICE MEADOWS: about their own countries PID strategy so that you have a bit of context for that. And then we will move over into a discussion period where we will address some sort of more general questions, and we hope those will then feed into the live discussion in the conference itself. So without further ado, I will hand over Linda to you.
LINDA O'BRIEN: Thanks, Alice. Let me just share my screen. OK all right. In Australia we're just embarking upon the development of the National Strategy and very much framed by the work of the Australian Research Data Commons. The ARDC is charged with accelerating the Australian Research and innovation ecosystem through data, and I've been fortunate enough to be asked to work with them on the development
LINDA O'BRIEN: of this strategy. A bit about the context we're operating in. We're not starting from ground zero. The ARDC has a persistent identifiers policy, in fact, that was put in place in June 2020, and it's got well-established services to support PID ORCID adoption is high. I was involved in establishing the Australian Open consortium. We now have more than 80% of our researchers using ORCID and now when they apply for an Australian Research Council
LINDA O'BRIEN: grant, 78% of the publications are coming via their ORCID. And we've been fortunate to work with More Brains on a recent cost benefit analysis commissioned by the IDC and the AAF, the Australian access federation, which supports the Australian working consortia. And they found that by adopting a handful of pids we could actually reduce administrative burden by some $24 million or 38,000 person days.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And if you reinvested that money into doing research, that could return as much as $84 million a year into economy wide benefit. And we also see quite a bit of interest in strategy development. And in fact, some organizations have their own and there's growing interest in working towards a strategy across a number of our research and government agencies. But we're fortunate that the National Research context is actually favorable to us in having
LINDA O'BRIEN: this conversation at this time. The Australian Research Council has established a working group to see how we use data more effectively to measure our research excellence, and the plan is to have a new process in place and implement it by 2024-25. So obviously you can see a role for us here and we're also seeing interest in the government establishing accords with each University around supporting research.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And there will be a report finished by the end of this year.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And there's particular interest in how we boost collaboration between universities and industry, and hence that interest in innovation, research and innovation and how the landscape plays out in supporting that. And finally, the ARDC has a project they've been funded for to look at how we better link industry and research. And the idea is to have a minimum viable product by the end of this year.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And I'm fortunate enough to be also working on that project. So the intent is that by the middle of this year,
LINDA O'BRIEN: we do have a broad understanding across the key stakeholders of the value of pids and how they contribute to our National Research and innovation ecosystem and a commitment from those stakeholders in implementing the intent of the strategy. And we have a governance structure in place to continue to live and develop that. We have a strategy which makes clear what our vision is and what we hope to achieve. We have a five year roadmap which would obviously be iterated on an annual basis, which will tell us how we're going to achieve that.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So the next steps continue to collaborate with others in who are also developing national strategies. So we can learn from each other. We're forming a steering committee
LINDA O'BRIEN: and invites are out at the moment for that steering committee to oversee the development of the strategy and road map. And we have a workshop planned currently for the 20th of February in Canberra. Thank you. And if you want to know more, you can find me.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks Thanks so much, Linda. And now over to John. He's going to tell us about what's happening in Canada. Thanks, John. You're on mute. Gotcha thank you. All right.
JOHN ASPLER: So very excited to be here and chatting with international colleagues about their respective PID strategies. I'll be talking a bit about the Canadian strategy. I'm the manager of the Canadian persistent identifier community at the Canadian research knowledge network. CRKN, and in Canada we have two major PID consortia that are managed out of CRKN ORCID Canada and DataCite Canada. And one of the main goals for both of these consortia, of course, is to connect entities and the research ecosystem over time, but in particular across siloed information systems.
JOHN ASPLER: That's why we need a centralized strategy, is to think about that question of interoperability and disconnected systems. CRKN acts as the administrative lead for ORCID-CA, but we recently took the DataCite Canada Consortium under our portfolio as well, which we co-manage with an organization called the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. And the Alliance has been essential in moving us from just management of a community into funding and offsetting fees in those communities.
JOHN ASPLER: And most importantly, perhaps, both of these consortia have governing committees made up of their respective membership. But they share a joint advisory committee called the Canadian Persistent Identifier Advisory Committee, or the CPIDAC.
JOHN ASPLER: And they aren't just providing strategic oversight to both of these consortia which, which have their own governing committees made up of members. But they're also looking beyond the existing consortia to think a bit about how to engage with other kinds of PIDs what are we going to do with ROR, for example, and also how we can develop this long term strategy for Canadian research institutions and different parts of the research ecosystem?
JOHN ASPLER: And that funding from the Alliance has been essential not just to offset member fees, to encourage and to encourage membership equitably, but also it's enabled the initial funding for the development of a National PID Strategy. So I won't talk too much about what it is that each of these kids do. You all know that, I think. But what's really important for us in Canada is thinking about in particular the bilingual approach and contextualized approach to providing services in English and in French.
JOHN ASPLER: And ultimately, again, thinking about how to integrate these services across all of these different siloed systems. In Canada, we had 44 members in ORCID-CA presently and there are about 180,000 folks with ORCID iDs. This has been growing quite a bit, about 25,000 ORCID iDs per year. And the Alliance importantly again has been offsetting the fees in this for the last two years, up to about 50% of those fees.
JOHN ASPLER: And really, that centralized funding is key to growing the community around persistent identifiers. When thinking about DataCite Canada, which existed before we took it on but became part of this PID umbrella program when we took it on. One of the most important things to think about for us, and this is maybe something to think about in the International community as well, is why was it easy for us to build a community around DataCite?
JOHN ASPLER:
JOHN ASPLER: And the answer is because they have a membership model that works and that that works inside of the kinds of models that we already have around Member Services. We support academic libraries across the country. And we have a membership based model for that. We have one for ORCID as a National Consortium. Now we have one for DataCite as a National Consortium. That central funding is really helpful when we're thinking about things like funding member fee offsets.
JOHN ASPLER: So when we start to look to newer PID organizations like ROR, there is no membership model just yet and even some of the more mature ones like Crossref, there are absolutely ways for us to engage there, but it's been less of an easy path forward than simply building a community around an existing member model. So that's why these two PID consortia are the ones that exist right now, and that's why we're trying to think about how we can engage with others going forward.
JOHN ASPLER: We have about 62 members and the amount of DOIs registered is growing year to year, which has been wonderful to see. And in the case of DataCite Canada, these fee offsets have been fairly substantial, up to 90% So: Why a national strategy in Canada? Well, first of all, of course, we're building off of the work of our international colleagues like everyone else on this call. Your consortia have been or your organizations have been fairly inspirational for us in Canada and thinking about how to move forward.
JOHN ASPLER: But ultimately, we can't actually make things connect together, which is the goal of PIDs without a community-driven and collaborative approach across all of these different sectors: universities, government departments, funders, publishers, even inside them, like inside universities, research offices, libraries, etc. In Canada, we have something called the Roadmap for Open Science developed by the government and PIDs are of course a part of that and are integral to ensuring the success of open science initiatives.
JOHN ASPLER: In the last few years, we have begun a first phase of work in consultation, thanks to the support of MoreBrains between CRKN and the Alliance and the CPIDAC. We finished phase one last year. We got some recommendations about what to do and going forward we're really going to be thinking about the challenges and problems for research that can be resolved by PIDs. And we really need to know which PIDs can help resolve which problems, which are the priority use cases in Canada toward the long term development of things like a PID-ptimized workflow for every kind of institution.
JOHN ASPLER: So with that, thank you very much.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks, John. That's great. Now we're heading South to Latin America and Washington is going to give us an update from there. Thanks, Washington.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: Thank you very much. I'll share my screen There put it in presentation mode. OK, so I'm presenting a work that we are doing this time in a very recent project in Brazil. Sorry sorry, sorry. Sorry because it is in.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: OK see.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: Sorry. OK. So this work is a project that we are doing in this moment. It's a kind of a PDF that uses the blockchain and it construct a kind of a hub or proxy in the National level to aggregate all the bids that we are working with.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: We also have National Consortium with DataCite and also with ORCID, and we also are working together with ROR to make it all the ecosystem with the pieces that we need. But this is decentralized blockchain implementation of ARK that it fires. So what is the motivation of this project?
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: We are avoiding unconnected multiple assignments. For example, if a journal article is deposited in two different repositories with two different, realize that they does know each other. This is a problem for us. We also need to facilitating bid assignments to multiple digital objects types for example articles, theses data sets, piece instruments and so on.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: And we also have to do it in many submission channels like repositories, journal, preprint servers and CV profiles and so on. We also want to need to generate an open cyberspace to publishing, disseminating and evaluation, evaluating systems, and also preserving metadata, though blockchain mechanisms. So the name we did, we give to it is dARK because it's a distributed ARK.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: ID we have a preprint that was published in the Xanadu poster that is accessible by via this link. And in the authors of these work are myself Lautaro Matas from La Referencia, Thiago Nobrega and Edison Filho. and Jesus Mena-Chalco. They are all of learners are Brazilian researchers in Brazil.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: But Lautaro Martinez is the executive director of La referencia. In ideas to build a blockchain consortium between the Brazilian institutions, also in the Latin American institutions. Moreover, and this consortium would assign bids that are kind of a proxy or a hobby of the PIDs that we already have. For example, a Doi or a kind or D ISSI, an Ark ID, and also our national IDs that are not persistent but are very important to us.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: The national contexts. And the proof of concept that we performed was building a blockchain with email page in we are able to assign a bit with that aggregates all the feeds of a specific digital object and retrieve it though the blockchain and the idea is that we will have many blockchain nodes spread over Brazil and also over Latin America to sustain this network.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: And then we are building plugins to this space and first and then to OJS in Dataverse to work with the blockchain in a transparent way. The user doesn't know that it is even a blockchain, but it has a behavior like API of a traditional service of assignment of PID.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: This is just a proof of concept. We we built this HTML page that could be embedded into a post or a journal or publishing system that we want. And this is a response example. These have our ID that we're assigning. And also the other IDs are external IDs like a Doi. And also it could be any kind of any type of ID ID.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: And also, we have this payload that is the content of the metadata we want to store in the blockchain. Here's the external links. And also we have a track of everything that is happening in the blockchain, like who, where and when the actions are being performed. So conclusions in future work.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: We are testing the benchmarks for this kind of system. We also in cooperation with Latin America and want to do abroad Latin America. And we are studying the metadata description of these objects because we want to use all the things that are in the order metadata description that are riding the market. And we also want to do the kind of governance of this network.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: And we intend to build a prediction service by the end of 2023 or after. So Thanks. Sorry for my broken English. I'm not native speaker. Thank you very much.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thank you so much. Washington that was great. And last but not least, we're going over to Christopher brown, who will tell us about what's happening in the UK.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: Thank you Alice Yeah I'm not going to go through the introductions again, so let's just move quickly on. So although it just we've been looking at persistent identifiers for quite some time, the most recent work really sort of came about from Professor Tickell's recommendation in the open access to research publications, independent advice to government 2018 that just should lead on selecting promoting a range of unique identifiers, including orchids, in collaboration with sector leaders.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: got a be part of organizations and also looked about agreeing a range of unique identifiers that can be mandated. So this sort of work kicked off from then and MoreBrains again. Another mention, Josh Brown, particularly wrote the PID roadmap report. This was sort of looking at identifying priority persistent identifiers.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: So the five priority PIDs that came about were listed there: grants, outputs, people, organizations, and projects. So these were the ones that felt most applicable to open access to research publications. And this roadmap report proposed the outline of a national strategy, further funding. And a lot of this work has come from funding, from UKRI and its elements like Research England and the SCRC.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: But the main project was the UK is for open access project. This is really creating a roadmap to implement the strategy, looking at the barriers and opportunities for adoption and building a community. I'm going to go into all the details of the work we've done over those years. I'm going to highlight some of the key outputs. Really, the most recent was some of funding.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: We had to support the strategy. So what are the key pieces of work that came out of this was really building a business case for investment in a UK PID strategy. So this report called for a national investment in activities to implement pits aligning with the Uk's strategic needs and also talked about is what we called a multi PID support consortia at one stage, but we sort of stuck with the PID support network now because that really describes what it is now going.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: A bit more detail in a minute about lowering the barriers and costs of PID adoption. And again, professor Tickell wrote an independent review of research bureaucracy for the government. And this endorsed that proposal for PID support network and recommended extending that model to other facets of digital research platforms. So you see how important it is to get that sort of commitment or endorsement from a high level.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: So one of the outputs, there's a link there. I'll show you a page we have which links everything, shows all the outputs that have been produced in this work in a minute. But this looks at funding content, publication data and it's future research management. This is really looking at a vision of a more efficient future where pids should fit in, where you could use pids.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: But we do have time to go to the details of those, but they're worth looking at. One thing that was quite important was setting up a governance structure. So we created this Research Identifier National Coordinating Committee. So far there've been three meetings. The last meeting was back in November. This is really stakeholders from across the sector, looking at governance, community accountability and providing that insights to shape the priorities and focus of the work that's been was being done within the UK.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: One of the things we talked a lot about was the benefits of persistent identifiers, particularly the priorityPIDs. But there wasn't really any evidence, financial evidence. So cost benefit analysis was done and this was done also in Australia. And following that Australia work, it was revised and it showed that 55,000 person days the cost of 90 pounds million wasted.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: Metadata so it shows the importance and amount of money that could be saved there of implementing five priority pids with the support of the CPSN. So at the moment, the most latest piece of work was really looking at the business planning of around a peer support network, also setting up a UK raid registration ANSI because obviously some of these aren't as well established as others.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: We've got ORCID because we run the UK ORCID consortium, so it's looking at UK RAID registration agency and some Pathfinder projects. So where we are at the moment now with just we're looking at actually taking those elements that be produced by more brains and putting those into a business case for both the PID support network and a RAID registration agency. And like I said, all the information is on that page.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: I mean, that's a very sort of whistle stop tour being run through of the UK strategy where we are approach, although we can probably talk about the discussion, whether it's an approach or a strategy, but also I'm involved in and was asked just to talk briefly about the International approach and I'm a co-chair of the National strategies working group for the RDA I'm one of the co-chairs there. And it's really looking at coordinating and aligning some of the different national strategies that an RDA is a great place to bring together national international experts.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: So we're looking at mapping the common activities across those national efforts, producing a guide and collecting case studies. Those are the case studies we've got so far from the UK, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, South Korea, but collecting a few more, developing the guide further producing a final report. As you can see, that deadline is quite close, June 23. But one thing I wanted to stress, because from what we've learnt from developing a how to guide, it's clear that national strategies or approaches are in the early stages and most countries don't have a strategy.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: They have an emerging initiative approach. And with the environment in flux, case studies and guides are snapshot at times under the UK. One needs to be rewritten or rewritten revise, I should say. And the scope of strategy approach varies between countries. But there are common elements, drivers and bits between those case studies, and that's just a summary of some of the key outputs and goals.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: And like I said, if you go to that page on just website, it has all that information. It will be updated with more information about the support network in the UK raid registration ANSI. So that's it for me.
ALICE MEADOWS: Wonderful thank you, Christopher. And thank you all so much. That was really helpful.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: Thank you.
ALICE MEADOWS: So I think this has set us up very well for a good discussion now. And unfortunately, Washington needs to bow out at this point from the recorded discussion. But he is going to be joining us for the live discussion during the conference. Christopher, unfortunately, won't be able to join us for that. So we get him now, but not then.
ALICE MEADOWS: So thank you so much, Washington, and we will see you at the live discussion.
WASHINGTON SEGUNDO: Thank you very much. And we see you very, very close today.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks so I think some of what you all raised in your presentations has, as I say, set us up very nicely for the questions we thought we would discuss at this point. The first of which is the kind of what I think of it as an elephant in the room question, which is why do you even need a national strategy or approach, if we want to call it an approach?
ALICE MEADOWS: You know, research is global. What's the point of each individual country doing its own thing? So who would like to tackle that one first? Linda, I see you have your microphone off you go
LINDA O'BRIEN: As a newer person to the development of strategy and I mean just reflecting on what we just heard from Christopher and John, the whole funding piece is clearly critical and getting that buy in from all those key stakeholders.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So situating it within a national context allows you to say how it will directly support things that nationally are important. And I know I've had a chance to talk to Christopher, not yet to John. And it's interesting how there's different drivers in each contexts, but where there's some overlap but some differences. So I think what I found fascinating is that some agencies have a PID strategy and that makes sense for them.
LINDA O'BRIEN: They need persistence within what they're managing. So potentially you can have them at multiple levels. And when I talk to stakeholders, I'm saying, but if this is of international research significance, we need to be part of that international approach if we want to be able to collaborate. So let's be clear on when it's framed in that context and when it's national and when it's more local. And think about how that plays out in the strategy.
LINDA O'BRIEN: But that's just an observation as the newbie sitting around this table. So I'm welcome thoughts from others.
JOHN ASPLER: Yeah, I agree completely, I think. Yeah, I was going to say funding funding, funding is for me the main thing, while there are opportunities internationally if we really are going to have funds to offset membership in PID organizations to develop the infrastructure, which is often itself national, we're going to need that funding.
JOHN ASPLER: And beyond funding, there are national interests. For example, in Canada we have particular data residency rules and some of the ways that we're going to be implementing or thinking about implementing, implementing PIDs need to take those into consideration in ways that, for example, in the States they might not need to in the same way. So we have rules and laws that we need to abide by. The GDPR in Europe is another good example, although I certainly don't know a huge amount about that.
JOHN ASPLER: So national contexts really help with that. And of course, in the Canadian context, we provide support bilingually in English and French. And even as we work with PID organizations, we run into issues where we notice sort of the primacy of English and some of the ways that we need to, or at least I think we need to, push back against that to ensure that organizations are represented and publications have their first language title primarily highlighted with any translated translation.
JOHN ASPLER: So others can read them for sure that's relevant too. But all that to say that the National Strategy funding is for sure the key item there. But there's also national jurisdiction, rules, and then ultimately interests like the linguistic interest here.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: I mean, I agree with everything was said. I mean yes, in the UK I mean the key driver has been the funding from one of our main funding organizations UK. Right so without that driver for them, a lot of this work wouldn't, wouldn't have taken place.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: And there are times when there'd been a bit of a hiatus where there hasn't been that funding. So it does need that driver. And also, you know, the PIDs are being helped that they've had the benefits of implementing. I think we shouldn't lose sight of, you know, about cost saving and more efficiencies and being a driver for more large funders. They want researchers to focus on research and not be focused on devoting too much time doing admin work.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: And that seems to be a national thing. I mean, obviously has impact internationally and a lot of research is international, but at a national level, yes, with that return on investment, you know, value for money. And I think the funders want that sort of value for money, more efficiencies, implementing those paths to just to create better say, world leading, you know, you know, it's a competitive world out there.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: So we want to make sure that the research is done more efficiently, effectively and delivers and researchers focus on research is a bit of a key driver nationally, but obviously there's elements there that affect or common internationally. But I think yeah, I agree with everything John just said.
LINDA O'BRIEN: Yeah, I think it's that strategic alignment using the language that we're hearing in the policy context as well, which might vary between nation, although there's similarities.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So if you can hook into that same language to evidence the value, I think that's very positive
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: because you know, we have the ukri open access policy, which is sort of mandating ORCIDs and encouraging the use of other persistent identifiers. I think it does need that driver. So moving on to a question later, that sort of top down driver because I mean, I've talked about, I was actually at a RAID workshop and some researchers said, you know, slightly negative, because they want to be doing research and not looking at doing admin and see another identify as sort of stopping them doing the research.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: But obviously it's actually saving them time, but that it's you have to sell the benefits of pids to researchers and sometimes you need that sort of mandate from, from your funders to encourage them to actually use these and also sell it. But it's a bit of both, really.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks, everyone. I think there's also a bit of an equity issue here as well, isn't there?
ALICE MEADOWS: And John, you alluded to that with the bilingual French English thing in Canada. And, you know, in both Australia and Canada, I think there are also, for example, there are inequities around, for example, Indigenous knowledge that pids can help address or could help address if they were implemented more fully. And then for everyone, actually, there's this sort of, you know, inequities between the large, very well funded research organizations, institutions and the sort of long tail of much less well funded ones.
ALICE MEADOWS: So it seems to me, and I think this is something that it's not just a national level issue, but it's partly a national level issue. This sort of making research more equitable at a national level seems to me to also be a big potential benefit of having a sort of having an implementing rapid approach, rapid strategy. So again, this next question, I think in many ways, you've sort of you've all approached one way or another in your or addressed one way or another in your presentations.
ALICE MEADOWS: But maybe we can dig a little bit more into sort of what the context is or was for your country's work on developing a PID strategy where did what drove it. And I think clearly the funder thing and the sort of looking to be more efficient is part of it. Maybe the equity issue is part of it, but is there anything else that you feel was really an important part of the context? What was the sort of trigger, Chris, you had mentioned the professor Tickell's work, but were there other triggers that have sort of made this work actually starts to happen in your countries.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: Well in the UK I mean, yeah, that was a key driver and that was around open access. But to me, it's all, it's all about this drive towards open research, things like promoting FAIR principles and adopting pids and reducing administrative burden, sort of a key driver for that work.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And I guess in Australia. And this is where I think.
LINDA O'BRIEN: The innovation pace comes in, there's a big push around evidencing the impact of research. So how do you evidence that those investments are making a difference, whether it's investments in infrastructure or just investments in undertaking the research? So how do you measure that impact and engagement? And so the research evaluation exercise is two - ones about research quality and one's about engagement and impact.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And there's an interest in government to reduce the administrative burden of the cost of those exercises by using data more effectively. So I think that's and it's happening in parallel for us. So everything's happening in parallel. So there's an opportunity for us to influence that process, but also then draw from that process because I think that will provide a really powerful platform around our strategy and may change how we're thinking about which we prioritize, because it's really about measuring that engagement and impact piece as well as the quality piece.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So it's a slightly different driver set. I mean, the open science and FAIR is still part of the National conversation, but at least from a federal government perspective, it's much more about this. How do you use data to more effectively evaluate how we're going in that space? So I think that's going to be our primary driver here.
JOHN ASPLER: Yeah I hear and agree with everything you both said.
JOHN ASPLER: I mean, one of the answers to this question for us in Canada is the work that Australia and the UK have done. So it's a bit circular, but other countries are doing this work. So probably also we should be doing this work. But all of these questions around, it's a bit instrumental, this question of research impact or convincing governments to fund more.
JOHN ASPLER: The goal, of course, is to increase knowledge and all of those good reasons why we do research. But we know that for governments, for funders, especially, these questions of sort of untracked research impact and also for institutions, for universities, that's a really key driver. So certainly that's part of our conversation, too. We've also been lucky enough to have a lot of these things emerge very organically.
JOHN ASPLER: We developed the ORCID consortium and then the folks that we had around the table from a variety of sector wide organizations on that that advisory committee I mentioned - it didn't used to be as big an advisory committee as it is now, it used to just be an advisory committee for ORCID Canada - and then when we brought DataCite Canada under our roof as well, we realized, well, if we're going to give them a governing committee.
JOHN ASPLER: The advisory committee is probably just going to be the exact same people. So why would we create a second DataCite advisory committee? Why wouldn't we just combine them into one? And that's part of what kickstarted our thought and then the community's thought on how we can really work together, not just to do these specific projects - you know, ORCID is good for this reason and DOIs are good for that reason, and keep them apart -
JOHN ASPLER: but really, how do we bring them together? So we were very lucky enough to have that organic sort of part bottom up, part top down collaborative approach. We expanded that advisory committee's scope. It had some funders. Now it has many more funders. It did some infrastructure, now it has more infrastructure. It had some library consortia, now it has all of the major library consortia.
JOHN ASPLER: So it really became a bit more of a systematic group from maybe 12 members to 25 members. And that for us is the start of this conversation is saying we have this Canada-wide coalition of organizations that are engaging on the question of what are we doing with ORCID and what are we doing with DataCite? And we're now leveraging their expertise and also sensitizing them to the challenges of PIDs to ensure that within their organizations and across their organizations, we can start to think about what PIDs are for.
JOHN ASPLER: So I know that we're pitching things like research impact as important reasons, but we still have a lot of the work to do toward the development of a strategy before we can really say what is going to drive this and why are we going to be doing these things? We just know we want to implement PIDs for a number of key reasons, and now we need to do a bit more work to find out a little bit more about what the community wants.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks I like actually that you say that Canada is somewhat doing this because looking at the UK and Australia and seeing them as leaders. But I think that's actually a really important thing. And this is perhaps a good segue way onto our next question because Christopher, particularly the work that you, you and others are leading with the RDA group, I think is really, really important here, looking at sort of what some of the common elements are that everybody should be looking at in any country or maybe even any organization should be looking at when thinking about developing and implementing a PID strategy or a PID approach.
ALICE MEADOWS: So maybe you could talk a little bit about what your work there has found in terms of those common elements. And then Linda and John, if there's anything else you want to add, obviously jump in.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: OK I just want to say also, it also works both ways. You know, I know we've done a lot of work in the UK, but we see other countries like, you know, Australia sitting actually creating a strategy because we've got the elements of a good strategy.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: I wouldn't say we have a strategy approach, so we see other countries doing. I think, oh, we need to keep up or we're going to be left behind. So it works both ways. Yes well, I mean, obviously, one of the obvious things is, you know, we selected those priority PIDs within the UK. And although I think it's important to stress that other PIDs are important, but you have to start somewhere.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: And I know other countries have similar but maybe slightly different needs and requirements, but I think that's a good starting point for a lot of them. One thing I should also stress about for the FDA is that the case studies have shown quite a lot of differences. So try to create a guide which has that sort of the common elements where initially we had this idea that a country that was thinking about a national approach or strategy could pick up the guidance or have this sort of blueprint or guide to how to do it.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: And I think that's a bit difficult because we compare the different case studies, but it's, it's a bit more complicated than that. But obviously there's priority, there's, there's clear arguments for why that investment is needed. We had that, I mean in the UK, I mean that was particularly key to get people at a very high strategic level within funding organization to support it.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: We do have to have that clear argument why that investment is needed. We have the governance structure with the RINCC. I've also mentioned that support network, a support network to actually provide that technical community support to institutions because as you said, it's not just about the large research organizations. We need to take everybody with us from the largest to the smallest.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: We can't just sort of make it a two tier or even three tier, but you need that leadership within the fund or whatever the funding behind it. And as I mentioned, the business case for investment. So those are the key things. So I know there's a UK bias to that, but those are sort of what I feel like the sort of key elements and the case studies have elements of it, those sort of similar elements really.
JOHN ASPLER: Yeah oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yes so completely agreed. Again, these questions of funding and centralized approaches and impact, it's all, in my view, a little bit instrumental. But it is necessary know we need to demonstrate in Canada, for example, the return on investment.
JOHN ASPLER: We are delighted to be able to point to both the UK and the Australian report on this topic. So we can say, look, it's they found that it saves money, maybe also we will save money. So these are of course a key part of developing the strategy and convincing folks, especially in the top down or policy space, how and why a PID strategy is useful. But but some of that to me is almost the preconditions towards a strategy.
JOHN ASPLER: We need the business case, we need the funding. We need the good reasons why we're going to do this. And of course, some of that is the PID use cases themselves. What are we using PIDs for? They can't just be PIDs for themselves. They have to be PIDs for a purpose. And so when we've been thinking about what is it that a National PID Strategy should consider, I sort of come back to part of what I said when I was talking about DataCite Canada and how the membership model and the community that can coalesce around it is a very clear approach for us.
JOHN ASPLER: It's one that enables us to have automatic buy in because you build a membership rather than saying, here's a tool, please use it. And so we don't know exactly what it's going to look like to start integrating and implementing things with ROR and other PID service providers. And I say ROR because it's a wonderful organization. It's also a newer one and they are thinking about these things.
JOHN ASPLER: So what kind of key common elements a national strategy could consider, thinking about that community of practice and what it means to build it up and support it, and who's a part of it and what infrastructure is in place to enable or perhaps to create barriers to entry. Sometimes that's funding. As long as we can get the funding to offset membership fees, we can make things happen. But if there are no membership fees, then we start to talk about, well, who's going to fund integrations and how are these happening and who's responsible for x, y, z, who's going to manage this?
JOHN ASPLER: So those are the kinds of things that I think a national strategy really needs to think about addressing.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And I guess the thing I would add from my experience and getting the Australian ORCID consortium off the ground was about how you tell the benefits to the different stakeholders, so how you can clearly articulate the value to each of the stakeholders that are part of the puzzle and not be afraid to have a fairly aspirational vision that, you know, I do remember our early conversations with the Australian Research Council around use of use of ORCID for grant applications, and they were hesitant about getting something locked in.
LINDA O'BRIEN: And I said, can we say our aspiration is to? yes, we can say that and and behold, it's happened and we can evidence the value of that work. So I think part of this national strategy is again, having that conversation, but it's much more complex than it was when you're trying to talk about the whole ecosystem. And I think it will be how do we clearly articulate the value proposition for each of the major stakeholders will be critical.
ALICE MEADOWS: Which is a wonderful segue into what's going to be the last question for this bit of the discussion, which is, so who are those stakeholders who should be involved in these conversations?
ALICE MEADOWS: You know, I think you can make the case for top down and bottom up, and it needs to be a combination of both. But perhaps you could each say a little bit about, you know, how broad and deep you're going in terms of stakeholder engagement on this.
JOHN ASPLER: Yeah, that's a really important question and I think we've already talked a bit about that - yeah, that top to bottom up, I agree,
JOHN ASPLER: it's a complex question, it needs to involve both. We need policymakers on one side and funders on one side, but we also need researchers creating their ORCID profiles. And, you know, you can't create them on behalf of someone. It really needs to be researcher centered. So that bottom up question is also important. Maybe I'll maybe what I do want to mention are questions of equity.
JOHN ASPLER: I think that came up a bit earlier. Chris, you mentioned large and small organizations and we want everyone to be brought along. Alice you mentioned questions of, for example, Indigenous data sovereignty and related... and of course we've talked about linguistic concerns. So all of those are really key for us. Of course, we need to include the publishers and the funders and the researchers and the institutions doing research, etc., etc., etc., but we also need to make sure that though that we're not just including sort of powerful stakeholders who are there because the money is on the line.
JOHN ASPLER: we're also making sure that we're engaging with Indigenous communities in Canada, for example, that I'm sure that there are linguistic questions in other places. I know I speak to it in Canada with English and French concerns. The Quebec environment and research there can be very different than it is in the rest of Canada, especially if it's happening in French and they're not necessarily speaking...
JOHN ASPLER: or the English community is not necessarily engaging with research in French and ensuring that this work is better connected nationally, but also internationally, and that the voices of the French research community are heard is really, really integral to this.
JOHN ASPLER: So all of the sectors need to be engaged, but also particular parts of them to ensure equity.
LINDA O'BRIEN: Yeah I guess what? Certainly indigenous data sovereignty is a big topic here and discussions around indigenous data and what that means. So that will certainly play into our thinking. But I think the thing that I've found most interesting.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So far is the real importance of getting those stakeholders on board that generate volumes, large volumes of data that are valuable for research purposes. And many of those are often government agencies. And so that kind of crossover into government policy making and government data management is, I'm finding really interesting because they want to use data better to drive policy making, but that data is equally valuable in the research context and that research informs the policy making.
LINDA O'BRIEN: So how do we think about that ecosystem, which is where it kind of goes beyond the local stakeholders because you're starting to morph into that government policy space, and I think there's a real opportunity there. It's just how that plays out, how we make that work, particularly in a country where you have three levels of government. So what does that look like? But that's the thing that I found interesting on our journey so far,
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: and I just agree with all those comments and I'll just say it really, it is that balance very top down and bottom up does ultimately come down to that sort of top down driver for funders.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: We need to get the publishers involved and also the vendors of some of these systems because we're looking at implementing and improving integration of systems. So those benefits, the impact of reducing the research admin burden, you know, to get those the vendors, publishers, state the institutions all on board. So I'm not going to repeat everything everyone has said, but I agree with that totally.
LINDA O'BRIEN: But yeah, I guess I just add from having been on the ORCID board. I think we can influence those national body, those international bodies as well, to help drive some of I mean, you mentioned vendors, for example. So I think it's how we leverage those key international bodies, but for national value as well.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: That's one of the benefits of making it from a national to international approach, you know, because research is international.
JOHN ASPLER: And that's where I know Washington's not here. But one of the things that struck me on his slides were where he pointed to a number of software systems that he was engaging with or that they were planning on engaging with. And they're all open infrastructure. So of course, we need the big vendors on board. But one of the things that we're looking at here is, of course, in Canada, every almost every university, when they have local journal journals, they are OJS run.
JOHN ASPLER: And if they have a data repository, it is Dataverse. And the vast majority of institutional repositories for publications and theses are DSpace-based. So we're focused on these open infrastructure initiatives. And that's part of the question of, of course, again, we need the big vendors on board, we need the funding. But some of that funding definitely needs to be driven towards those internationally, strategically valuable and open tools like OJS, DSpace, Dataverse - just to name the three that were on that slide, that we also happen to be focusing on here.
JOHN ASPLER: I'm sure there are many other important initiatives and that funding has to come from somewhere. And it has to be valued and it has to be highlighted. But the benefit of that is that it's then for everyone internationally.
ALICE MEADOWS: And that's a wonderful note to end on because, yes, as I said before, I do think a lot of what this is driving at is really improving equity at the National level for researchers and research institutions.
ALICE MEADOWS: And I completely agree with you, John, that the open systems are a key part of that. But but, yes, we want support from everybody in order to make the National international personal visions of a optimized world a reality. Thank you all so much for joining this discussion and for sharing your views, and I look forward to continuing it in the live discussion at the conference.