persistent identifiers & open scholarly infrastructure
a primer for the rdm for busy people series.
mike nason
open scholarship & publishing librarian @ unb libraries
crossref & metadata liaison @ pkp
persistent identifiers as open scholarly infrastructure
a primer for the rdm for busy people series.
mike nason
open scholarship & publishing librarian @ unb libraries
crossref & metadata liaison @ pkp
part i // ~60m
11:00-12:00
overview of persistent identifiers, open scholarly infrastructure, and what researchers need to know about them.
the talk will cover DOIs, ORCID, ROR, and other players/service providers in the PID space.
part ii // ~30m
12:15-12:45
overview of the services and features of ORCID, including information on signing up for the service and adding your publications/works to your profile.
introductions
it's me, mike! hello! i hope you're well, despite [gestures broadly] everything.
i'm your open scholarship & publishing librarian.
in short, ...
... my job is about helping you make the results of your research as accessible to the public (or, relevant research communities) as you need them to be, whether that's due to funding mandates, personal interest, or a sort of proactive capitulation.
i am here to help you. it's, like, specifically built into the cba (16c.02). it is what librarians are for.
research data management
tri-agency oa requirements
open access publishing
scholar profiles
repositories
digital publishing
open educational resources
open infrastructure
persistent identifiers
scholarly publishing
scholarly communications
part i
i'd like for you to keep a thought on the backburner.
pids are in the drinking water of scholarly publishing
i'll come back to this.
like, a lot.
part i
overview of persistent identifiers, open scholarly infrastructure, and what researchers need to know about them.
the talk will cover DOIs, ORCID, ROR, and other players/service providers in the PID space.
agenda
- what is a persistent identifier?
- what is a registration agency?
- what is open scholarly infrastructure?
- what pids should i care about?
let's start small.
the doi
dois
dois are ubiquitous. we see them all over the place:
- in references/bibliographies
- on article/journal websites
- in repositories
- on published datasets
- links on twitter or researchgate or academia dot edu or, or, or...
and, we probably know one handy thing about them:
if you click on a doi that looks like a link, it will take you to the thing.
dois
dois are the most prominent persistent identifier.
they are also, arguably, the most important persistent identifier.
how a doi works
a doi is made up of two chunks. a prefix, and a suffix.
prefix
10.4324
suffix
9780203051238-5
together, these make the doi 10.4324/9780203051238-5
how a doi works
prefixes and suffixes mean different things.
prefix
10.4324
a prefix is usually associated with a publisher or organization. dois for that organization will usually have the same prefix.
suffix
9780203051238-5
a suffix is meant to be a machine-readable (not human-readable), opaque, unique string that is specific to the singular work to which it is assigned.
(we'll talk more about this)
how a doi works
if i prepend a doi with https://doi.org/, it turns into a url.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203051238-5
clicking this will redirect me to the publication this doi is associated with. the process of a doi redirecting you to a publication is called resolution.
what's "resolution"?
how doi resolution works
dois aren't just like a bit.ly link or tiny.url. if you're not familiar with these services, they will swap out a very large and unwieldy link so you can share something that isn't enormous.
for example: https://bit.ly/35LaEXj
this is a bit.ly link for this talk
the actual url for this talk is: https://slides.com/ahemnason/persistent-identifiers-pids-and-open-scholarly-infrastructure/
bit.ly and tiny.url are both basic redirects.
how doi resolution works
a doi, though, is a lot more than a redirect. a doi is a reference to an entire publication record. that publication record is full of metadata.
one of these metadata elements is the publication's url.
when you resolve a doi by clicking on it:
- the record is accessed
- the stored url is retrieved
- you are sent to the stored url
the url can be updated by the publisher. the doi stays the same.
neat!
it is.
surely, there is more to it?
🤔
congratulations, you now know more about dois than a frankly surprising amount of people.
and, by extension, you now know more about pids than a frankly surprising amount of people.
so, dois are pids?
dois are definitely pids.
what a pid is
an identifier // a label which gives a unique name/label to an entity: a person, place, or thing.
persistent // long-lasting
are you seriously about to tell me what an identifier is?
what an identifier is
absolutely. an identifier is a unique string of characters assigned to something, someplace, or someone that can be used to identify it.
- social insurance number
- driver's license number
- medicare number
- license plate number
- student number
we are assigned identifiers all the time. we (ideally) carry "ID".
what an identifier is
identifiers typically refer to physical objects and are often created/managed locally. they're useful for record-keeping and data retrieval/searchability. they're useful for disambiguation, too!
- unb student id is only a useful label for unb students.
- social insurance numbers are provided federally.
- medicare numbers are provided provincially.
- a license plate is only a label for a current, registered car.
there is more than one mike nason in canada, but only one of them has my social insurance number (i hope).
dois are identifiers
doi is an acroynm for:
Digital Object Identifier
did you just spend three slides telling me what an id is?
yes.
but that's because pids share the same benefits! they're good for disambiguation, data retrieval, searchability...
we've scratched the surface a bit on what a doi does, but url storage and redirection is just one benefit for one kind of pid.
for example
i might write my own name as:
- Mike Nason
- Michael Nason
- Michael Thomas William Nason
- M. Nason
- mnason
- ahemnason
and! there may be more than one of any of these! the more variations and folks with the same name there are, the harder it is to find the stuff i've done. a pid for people would make attribution and discovery easier.
ok, so what about persistence?
what a persistent identifier is
persistent identifiers most frequently refer to digital things. traditionally, we share or locate digital things using a link (a url).
url // uniform resource locator
(https://www.example.com/index.html)
we know that urls break all the time, for lots of different reasons.
what a persistent identifier does
a url can tell you where something was when you read it. if you bookmark that url or put it in print, you're assuming that it will still work later. this is not guaranteed!
but, as we discussed earlier, using dois i can update the location if the content moves. i can provide a persistent link to a record that contains a url.
the id is persistent. where it directs me may change.
a doi is persistent. where the doi resolves may change.
what a persistent identifier does
so, imagine finding the citation for this work in a bibliography... which of these two will be more useful if the content moves from the website it is currently on?
Smiraglia, R. (2005). Metadata: A Cataloger's Primer (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203051238/metadata-richard-smiraglia
Smiraglia, R. (2005). Metadata: A Cataloger's Primer (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203051238
what about
orcid?
what orcid is
ORCID stands for "open researcher and contributor id"
ORCID is also the name of the not-for-profit organization that provides ORCID IDs, maintains the service, and develops the website and API
if you're the kind of person who is bothered when people say "pin number", you'll hate orcid. no one says "ORC IDs".
what is an orcid?
we typically call them "orcid ids" or "orcids"
what an orcid id is
orcid ids are a kind of pid.
what an orcid is
first and foremost, orcid ids help consistently and properly identify the authors of works no matter what their name is, was, or will be
nearly every publisher can take an orcid id as metadata associated with a publication
this metadata can save people time
for example
i might write my own name as:
- Mike Nason
- Michael Nason
- Michael Thomas William Nason
- M. Nason
- mnason
- ahemnason
orcid also provides users with what's known as an orcid profile
when you hear someone talk about a scholar profile or a researcher profile, they are probably talking about orcid, scopus id, researcher id, or google scholar (but they might be talking about something else entirely)
i've done a handful of talks on this, links for them are on the next slide
what a persistent identifier does
pids make things easier to find, track, share, and access!
and so, "persistent identifier"
a unique, unchanging, identifier representing an object (digital or otherwise) that can direct a user, unambiguously, to that object's current location.
a pid cannot just do this inherently, though...
pids require a third party
often, folks use the phrase "minting a doi" to describe the assignment of a doi to a work. i see this a lot. a journal editor might say to me, "i made all these dois but they don't work! i just get an error!"
a publisher can mint pids and provide them to you, but they need a third party to be at all useful.
to work, a pid needs to be registered with a pid registration agency.
what's a registration agency?
registration agencies
persistent identifiers are managed by registration agencies (typically international not-for-profits) that store records/metadata, facilitate resolution requests, and may or may not offer other services based on membership. they do much of this through APIs.
there are a lot of registration agencies!
registration agencies
it's important to know that registration agencies differ in mandate, governance, scope, service, supported objects, membership terms, and feature set.
they also, often, work together and share data.
let's review
the field
pids for scholarly works
Crossref (DOI)
most scholarly publishers are crossref members. at the time i wrote this (1pm, april 6th) crossref had 134,294,189 dois registered with their service.
crossref are a big deal.
articles
proceedings
monographs
*datasets
funding agencies
grants
reports
standards
preprints
pids for scholarly works
Datacite (DOI)
while some scholarly publishers use datacite for article dois, it is much more commonly used in data/institutional/disciplinary repositories.
datacite and crossref work together to connect research data to publications.
software
datasets
collections
audio/visual
event
model
*publications
pids for researchers
ORCID (ISNE)
Scopus ID
WoS Researcher ID
orcid are the go-to here, with scopus and wos offerings both restricted to publications present on those platforms. however, these services can share data between them.
researchers
pids for organizations
ROR
GRID
ISNE
there are good odds you'll never need to know what the ror id for unb is. the predominant use-case for organizational ids is in strengthening connections between records using open scholarly infrastructure.
organizations
a quick example re: ror
we write UNB as:
- UNB
- University of New Brunswick
- UNBF / UNBSJ
- UNB Fredericton
- University of New Brunswick Saint John
registration agencies
registration agencies provide metadata schema through which users can describe the objects they are registering pids for.
as you can imagine, you'd describe a person differently than you'd describe a dataset, or a journal article, or an organization. even when agencies use the same type of pid (like the doi), the schema they use may vary.
for example
let's look the registered metadata for a doi: 10.4324/9780203051238-5
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<crossref_result version="3.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org/qrschema/3.0 http://www.crossref.org/schemas/crossref_query_output3.0.xsd">
<query_result>
<head>
<doi_batch_id>none</doi_batch_id>
</head>
<body>
<query status="resolved">
<doi type="book_content">10.4324/9780203051238-5</doi>
<crm-item name="publisher-name" type="string">Informa UK Limited</crm-item>
<crm-item name="prefix-name" type="string">Informa UK (Routledge)</crm-item>
<crm-item name="member-id" type="number">301</crm-item>
<crm-item name="citation-id" type="number">122425695</crm-item>
<crm-item name="book-id" type="number">1477192</crm-item>
<crm-item name="deposit-timestamp" type="number">2020122110554080199</crm-item>
<crm-item name="owner-prefix" type="string">10.4324</crm-item>
<crm-item name="last-update" type="date">2020-12-21T15:07:00Z</crm-item>
<crm-item name="created" type="date">2020-12-21T15:06:59Z</crm-item>
<crm-item name="citedby-count" type="number">0</crm-item>
<doi_record>
<crossref xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org/xschema/1.1 http://doi.crossref.org/schemas/unixref1.1.xsd">
<book book_type="other">
<book_metadata language="en">
<contributors>
<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>Richard</given_name>
<surname>Smiraglia</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>
<titles>
<title>Metadata</title>
<subtitle>A Cataloger's Primer</subtitle>
</titles>
<edition_number>0</edition_number>
<publication_date media_type="online">
<month>11</month>
<day>12</day>
<year>2012</year>
</publication_date>
<isbn media_type="electronic">9780203051238</isbn>
<publisher>
<publisher_name>Routledge</publisher_name>
</publisher>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.4324/9780203051238</doi>
<timestamp>2020122110554078499</timestamp>
<resource>https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136435843</resource>
</doi_data>
</book_metadata>
<content_item component_type="chapter" publication_type="full_text" language="en">
<titles>
<title>Understanding Metadata and Metadata Schemes</title>
</titles>
<publication_date>
<year>2012</year>
<month>11</month>
<day>12</day>
</publication_date>
<pages>
<first_page>25</first_page>
<last_page>44</last_page>
</pages>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.4324/9780203051238-5</doi>
<timestamp>2020122110554080199</timestamp>
<resource>https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136435843/chapters/10.4324/9780203051238-5</resource>
</doi_data>
</content_item>
</book>
</crossref>
</doi_record>
</query>
</body>
</query_result>
</crossref_result>i'm sorry to do this to you.
there's a lot of information here:
publisher
deposit and update timestamp
book type
contributors (first, role=author)
title and subtitle
publication date
doi for the book
link for the book
chapter title
doi for the chapter
link for the chapter
<doi_data>
<doi>10.4324/9780203051238</doi>
<timestamp>2020122110554078499</timestamp>
<resource>https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136435843</resource>
</doi_data>
</book_metadata>
<content_item component_type="chapter" publication_type="full_text" language="en">
<titles>
<title>Understanding Metadata and Metadata Schemes</title>
</titles>
<publication_date>
<year>2012</year>
<month>11</month>
<day>12</day>
</publication_date>
<pages>
<first_page>25</first_page>
<last_page>44</last_page>
</pages>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.4324/9780203051238-5</doi>
<timestamp>2020122110554080199</timestamp>
<resource>https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136435843/chapters/10.4324/9780203051238-5</resource>
</doi_data>
<!-- urls are part of the metadata of a doi. -->
<!-- when you change the location of content, you update your doi with the new location. everyone who uses the doi gets to the content no matter where you put it, so long as that doi is updated. this means, the doi is persistent.-->metadata is hugely useful
unlike publications themselves, metadata is typically free. and, we can learn a lot from it. crossref, for example, can store the following things as publicly accessible metadata:
title
subtitle
authors
orcids
affiliation
copyright license
funder/grant ids
languages
ror
references
resource location
version
publisher
journal
volume/issue
related dois
dates
abstracts
crossref makes this metadata available through a public api.
is it time for you to tell me what an API is?
what an api is
api stands for
Application Programming Interface
an API is, basically, a set of rules for interacting with software
think of it as being a little like a translator working as an intermediary between two people who don't speak the same language
what an api is
APIs are everywhere. when my calendar app tells me today's forecast, it's accessing that information using the Accuweather API. when my watch vibrates because i got a text message, that's because Garmin's API is communicating with Apple's notifications API.
APIs are how disparate systems, built by different people, using different languages and definitions, find common ground and share information.
this is open scholarly infrastructure
this network of APIs is like a municipal water system (get it?). it is, increasingly, infrastructure relied upon by researchers and institutions whether or not they are really aware of it.
almost all open scholarly infrastructure is based around APIs.
open scholarly infrastructure
what open scholarly infrastructure is
open scholarly infrastructure is a network of scholarly-research-focused open-source platforms, service providers, and APIs that work in concert to share data, illuminate relationships, and make research more discoverable.
https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/
open scholarly infrastructure is best described through examples.
example one // orcid
i am setting up my orcid account
let's pretend
example one // orcid
within orcid, i can check against the crossref and datacite APIs for any publications matching my name.
i want to add my publications!
example one // orcid
it will take me a while to do this the first time, and it’ll only work if my articles have dois.
most publications register dois
example one // orcid
for all my publications I know are mine (and have dois) the metadata is automatically pulled into my orcid account.
orcid pulls that metadata from the crossref API.
but...
example one // orcid
now that I have an orcid, that metadata (ideally) is included in the doi when I publish.
crossref will say to orcid, "we know this work belongs to this scholar, because their orcid is in the metadata. we'll just push this new publication to their record automatically."
and...!
example two // unpaywall
but, i use this browser extension called unpaywall.
the unpaywall plugin will tell me if an article i'm looking for has an open access version i don't know about.
i'm looking for an article i need, but the library doesn't have a subscription.
example two // unpaywall
because unpaywall indexes metadata crawled from open institutional or disciplinary repositories world wide and compares that metadata against datacite and crossref APIs, it can show me an open access version of a work if it exists.
this might be a preprint or an accepted manuscript. it might not be the same as the final version, but it's definitely a version i now have access to.
unpaywall uses the doi for the article i'm looking at and...
example three // funders and orcid
i've applied for funding from an agency that has an orcid account or integration.
let’s pretend…
example three // funders and orcid
funding id
grant id
datasets
articles
that agency can push new data to my orcid account.
example three // funders and orcid
the next time I apply for funding, i just push my orcid to the agency and they can pull my works without me filling out the same form again.
and ideally...
open scholarly infrastructure ties the room together
the water supply
open scholarly infrastructure
without the crossref API, all of these examples kind of fall apart.
publications that aren’t using dois are, essentially, “off the grid.”
the absence of these connections results in a lot of folks entering the same metadata into systems, over and over, by hand. Or hiring graduate students to do this for them.
that's an excellent use of everyone's time, definitely.
persistent identifiers
in concert with open scholarly infrastructure, pids allow us to see the big picture through these connections and interactions. it can expose relationships between data and research or institutions and outcomes. it can make research outcomes more discoverable.
when we talk about pids, we’re talking about supporting open infrastructure and free exchange of metadata.
a word on metadata
the metadata we get out of these systems, and its utility, is very much dependent on its quality.
we have a general expression in the metadata universe. that's "garbage in, garbage out."
metadata is kind of everyone's responsibility. researchers, librarians, publishers, registration agencies... everyone has a stake in accurate, usable metadata.
metadata is a very complicated topic i could talk about for twice the length of this talk. any time! let me know! i'll do it.
i understand that this is a lot.
what i'm hoping you'll come away with today is a little perspective.
pids aren't
- just links to things
- academic bit.ly
- status symbols
- permanent
- magic
pids are
- potentially huge time savers
- useful for finding research
- interconnected between services
- the backbone of open scholarly infrastructure
thanks for listening to this bit!
i sure hope that it was coherent.
we're gonna take a break
we'll reconvene at 12:15
part ii
part ii
12:15-12:45
overview of the services and features of ORCID, including information on signing up for the service and adding your publications/works to your profile.
agenda
- what is orcid profile?
- what are the benefits to orcid?
- what are the concerns with orcid?
- live demo of orcid.
what is an orcid profile?
what an orcid profile is
an orcid profile is basically an online, academic cv
users can fill out their information for:
- employment
- education/qualifications
- invited positions/distinctions
- membership/service
- funding
- works
they can control what is public or private
what an orcid profile is
orcid profiles are free for anyone to get
you don't need to be affiliated with an institution
they are ideal for scholars who move between institutions because they have full control over what is in the profile, and who can access it.
what an orcid profile is
sharing your orcid id will allow someone to see everything you've set to public
when you publish with an orcid id, it will be displayed along with your name and affiliation so anyone interested can view your public profile
what an orcid profile is
also because your orcid id is stored as metadata within a doi, crossref or datacite can push publication metadata to your orcid profile when you publish
within your profile settings, you can set datacite and crossref as trusted parties. this way, so long as you publish somewhere that uses dois, you will not have to manually enter your publications into your profile
what an orcid profile is
you can also share metadata and publications between scopus id/researcher id and orcid.
you can use your orcid id to populate them, or vice versa
within your profile settings, you can set scopus id/researcher id as trusted parties.
what an orcid profile is
it is possible to share your publication record using your orcid profile instead of submitting a long list of citations
this is increasingly common, and supported (if not required) by a number of funders worldwide
none of those funders are canadian (yet)
this sounds pretty good
it is
this is the basic sales pitch to researchers, i think
a not-for-profit profile service that serves as a portable academic cv that allows for some automation of metadata entry
and
is increasingly used for grant applications or other administrative time savings
it is easy to recommend and easy to use
signing up is astoundingly simple
metadata entry and correction, as always, takes a non-trivial amount of time
scholars have control, and can dictate access to/from trusted parties
what is a trusted party?
who has access to what?
what a trusted party is
to talk about this, we need to talk about APIs again.
as you may recall from part i, an API (application programming interface) is, basically, a set of rules for interacting with software
think of it as being a little like a translator working as an intermediary between two people who don't speak the same language
what a trusted party is
orcid has two apis
it has a public api, which is open. you can write software that pulls metadata from the public api. but it only exposes public metadata from a profile.
it also has a member api, which is closed and restricted to organizations who are orcid members. (we are an orcid member)
what a trusted party is
a trusted party is an organization who has been authorized by orcid to:
- read private metadata as well as public
- write metadata to a profile on the researcher's behalf
but, the researcher has to individually allow a trusted party. the researcher has full control over external access via the member api. the process requires consent.
what a trusted party is
these trusted party interactions; where an organization can leverage the member api for publishing metadata and private details (assuming the researcher says "yes"), are very often referred to as integrations
do we have one of those?
not at the moment, no
please tell me this can help with my ccv.
what about ccv?
the ccv (canadian common cv) has no integrations with anyone. it doesn't have an open api at all, and is not actively developed.
it is possible to get publication metadata from orcid to ccv. i wrote a guide for that.
ccv ingests bibtex, which you might recall was the prominent citation schema of endnote. it's also the way metadata is stored in orcid.
what about ccv?
the tri-agency is currently looking into the successor for ccv.
you can read more about that project here.
we can assume it will support orcid ingest, but we absolutely do not know that for sure.
why should i care about orcid?
well, orcid is useful for:
- personally tracking publication history and name disambiguation for our scholars
- submitting citation information to member organizations that are trusted parties (funding bodies in the US or the UK in particular)
- a portable cv that some schools in Canada can use instead of a word document for assessment/annual review (those with a significant investment in their CRIS systems)
- tracking information that scopus- and researcher-id do not track (they are journal-specific)
orcid is useful for:
being a modern researcher interested in saving yourself some drudgery.
it is best described as an investment. it will take time and effort to fully set one up, but ideally, in the not-too-distant future, its ubiquity will extend to canadian researchers.
the bottom line
for researchers, interest in orcid may vary from discipline-to-discipline, career-to-career
some are very on-board and into it. some could care less. some folks are concerned that it's a little like being barcoded.
the bottom line
ultimately, it is worth noting that even if UNB did use a platform that supported ORCID (and right now, they do not), each researcher would have to decide whether or not to make UNB a trusted party that could see private information.
let's pop over to orcid.org and take a tour
thanks, by the way
