CDL on Crossref

Org ID: a recap and a hint of things to come

John Chodacki — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/67sj-4y05.

Over the past couple of years, a group of organisations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organisation identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.

Community-led effort

First, I would like to summarize all of the work that has gone into this project, a truly community-driven initiative, over the last two years:

A series of collaborative workshops were held at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio TX (2016), the FORCE11 conference in Portland OR (2016), and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik (2016).
Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which we made openly available to the community for public comment:
organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF)
organisation Identifier Provider Landscape (PDF)
Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry (PDF)
A Working Group worked throughout 2017 and voted to approve a set of recommendations and principles for ‘governance’ and ‘product’:
Governance Recommendations
Product Principles and Recommendations
We then put out a Request for Information that sought expressions of interest from organisations to be involved in implementing and running an organisation identifier registry.
There was a really good response to the RFI; reviewing the responses and thinking about next steps led to our most recent stakeholder meeting in Girona in January 2018, where ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that meets the Working Group’s requirements for a community-led, organisational identifier registry.

Thank you

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this effort so far. We’ve been able to make good progress with the initiative because of the time and expertise many of you have volunteered. We have truly benefited from the support of the community, with representatives from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; American Physical Society, California Digital Library, Cornell University, Crossref, DataCite, Digital Science, Editeur, Elsevier, Foundation for Earth Sciences, Hindawi, Jisc, ORCID, Ringgold, Springer Nature, The IP Registry, and U.S. Geological Survey involved throughout this initiative. And we couldn’t have done any of it without the help and guidance of our consultants, Helen Szigeti and Kristen Ratan.

The way forward

The recommendations from our initiative have been converted into a concrete plan for building a registry for research organisations. This plan will be posted in the coming weeks.

The initiative’s leadership group has already secured start-up resourcing and is getting ready to announce the launch plan—more details coming soon.

We hope that all stakeholders will continue to support the next phase of our work – look for announcements in the coming weeks about how to get involved.

As always, we welcome your feedback and involvement as this effort continues. Please contact me directly with any questions or comments at john.chodacki@ucop.edu. And thanks again for your help bringing an open organisation identifier registry to fruition!

References

Bilder, G., Brown, J., & Demeranville, T. (2016). Organisation identifiers: current provider survey. ORCID. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/4716

Cruse, P., Haak, L., & Pentz, E. (2016). organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward. ORCID. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/2906

Fenner, M., Paglione, L., Demeranville, T., & Bilder, G. (2016). Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/7885

Laurel, H., Bilder, G., Brown, C., Cruse, P., Devenport, T., Fenner, M., … Smith, A. (2017). ORG ID WG Product Principles and Recommendations. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047

Laurel, H., Pentz, E., Cruse, P., & Chodacki, J. (2017). organisation Identifier Project: Request for Information. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5458162

Pentz, E., Cruse, P., Laurel, H., & Warner, S. (2017). ORG ID WG Governance Principles and Recommendations. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002

Organisation Identifier Working Group Update

Ed Pentz — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organisation-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organisation identifier registry and invite community feedback.

The organisation Identifier (OrgID) Working Group was established as a joint effort by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID in January 2017. The members of the group bring a broad range of experience and perspectives, including expertise in research data discovery, data management, persistent identifiers, economics research, funding, archiving, non-profit membership organisations, academia, publishing, and metadata development.

The Working Group was charged with refining the structure, principles, and technology specifications for an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

The group has been working in three interdependent areas: Governance, Registry Product Definition, and Business Model & Funding, and today releases for public comment its findings and recommendations for governance and product requirements.

We invite your feedback!

Please send comments by October 15th, 2017.

The OI Project gets underway planning an open organisation identifier registry

Ed Pentz — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organisation identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.

We had a great response and are happy to report that the Working Group has now been established, and is already underway with work to develop a plan for an open, independent, not-for-profit, sustainable, organisation identifier registry.

There is information about the OI Project Working Group on the ORCID website including a list of the 17 working group members. They represent a broad range of scholarly communications stakeholders. Our scope of work includes three separate but interdependent areas:

Governance;
Registry Product Definition; and
Business Model & Funding.

The initial goal of the Working Group is to create a thorough and robust implementation plan by the end of 2017.

Please take a look at the website for more information and we’ll provide updates as things progress throughout the course of the year.

Please contact us with any questions.

The Organisation Identifier Project: a way forward

Ed Pentz — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success. Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.

But there still seems to be one piece of the infrastructure that is missing. There is as yet no open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for organisation identifiers and associated metadata.

In order to understand this gap, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID have been collaborating to:

Explore the current landscape of organisational identifiers;
Collect the use-cases that would benefit our respective stakeholders in scholarly communications industry;
Identify those use-cases that can be more feasibly addressed in the near term; and
Explore how the three organisations can collaborate (with each other and with others) to practically address this key missing piece of scholarly infrastructure.

The result of this work is in three related papers being released by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID for community review and feedback. The three papers are:

organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF; GDoc)
organisation Identifier Provider Landscape (PDF; GDoc)
Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry (PDF; GDoc)

We invite the community to comment on these papers both via email (oi-project@orcid.org) and at PIDapalooza on November 9th and 10th and at Crossref LIVE16 on November 1st and 2nd. To move The OI Project forward, we will be forming a Community Working Group with the goal of holding an initial meeting before the end of 2016. The Working Group’s main charge is to develop a plan to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

Crossref Use Cases

Crossref has also been discussing the needs of its members over the last year and there is value in focusing on the affiliation name ambiguity problem with research outputs and contributors. In terms of the metadata that Crossref collects, something that is missing has been affiliations for the authors of publications. Over the last couple of years, Crossref has been expanding what it collects - for example, funding and licensing data and ORCID iDs - and this enables a fuller picture of what we are calling the article nexus. In order to continue to fill out the metadata we collect - and for our members to use in their own systems and publications - we need an organisation identifier.

Another use case for Crossref is identifying funders as part of collecting funder data to enable connecting funding sources with the published scholarly literature. In order to enable the reliable identification of funders in the Crossref system we created the Open Funder Registry that now has over 15,000 funders available as Open Data under a CC0 waiver. While this has been very successful, it is a very narrowly focused registry and is not suitable for a broad, community-run organisation identifier registry that addresses the affiliation use case. In future, our goal will be to merge the Open Funder Registry into the identifier registry that the organisation Identifier Working Group will work on.

By working collaboratively we can define a pragmatic and cost-effective service that will meet a fundamental need of all scholarly communication stakeholders.

Geoffrey Bilder will be focusing his talk at Crossref LIVE16 this week on this initiative, dubbed The OI Project. The talk is scheduled for 2pm UK time and will be live streamed along with the rest of that day’s program.

Announcing PIDapalooza - a festival of identifiers

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The buzz is building around PIDapalooza - the first open festival of scholarly research persistent identifiers (PID), to be held at the Radisson Blu Saga Hotel Reykjavikon November 9-10, 2016.

PIDapalooza will bring together creators and users of PIDs from around the world to shape the future PID landscape through the development of tools and services for the research community. PIDs support proper attribution and credit, promote collaboration and reuse, enable reproducibility of findings, foster faster and more efficient progress, and facilitate effective sharing, dissemination, and linking of scholarly works.

We believe that by bringing together everyone who’s working with PIDs for two days of discussions, demos, workshops, brainstorming, updates on the state of the art, and more, we can make this happen faster. And you can help by giving us your input on which sessions would be most valuable. Please send us your ideas, using this form by September 18. We will send session proposal notifications the first week of October with the festival lineup.

Register to attend

Registration is now open — come join the festival with a crowd of like-minded innovators. And please help us spread the word about PIDapalooza in your community!

Stay updated with the latest news on on the PIDapalooza website and on Twitter (@PIDapalooza) in the coming weeks.

Looking forward to seeing you in November!