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An Astoundingly Brief Primer on Persistent Identifier Context, Orgs, and Open Infrastructure

​

Mike Nason

Scholarly Communications and Publishing Librarian, UNB Libraries | Crossref and Metadata Liaison, PKP

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Before we dig in, I need to make one thing super clear…

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PIDs are in the drinking water of scholarly publishing.

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Let’s review some things we know.

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PIDs are unique IDs that we assign to an increasing number of things: �

    • Institutions
    • Datasets
    • People
    • Organizations
    • Articles
    • Monographs
    • Serials

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PIDs should/can make locating and tracking materials/research easier.

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PIDs are great for disambiguation and consistent metadata, �because:�

    • Names aren’t unique.
    • Names don’t follow rules.
    • URLs change.
    • Places, people, institutions… etc. are identified in myriad ways.

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Judicious application of PIDs (and ubiquitous uptake) could save a lot of time.

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Let’s review some things that are less well known.

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PIDs are tied to registration agencies who collect & distribute metadata publicly.

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Registration agencies use different and variably compatible metadata schema.

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“Persistence is purely a matter of service.”

- J. Kunze, 2013

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PIDs aren’t meant to be human-readable, custom URLs.

(DOIs ≠ fancy bit.ly)

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There are many registration organizations and types of PIDs

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Institutions

ROR

GRID

ISNI

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Researchers

ORCID (ISNI)�ScopusID�WoS ResearcherID

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Articles�Proceedings�Monographs�*Datasets�Funding Agencies�Grants�Reports�Standards�Preprints

Crossref / DOI

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Software�Datasets�Collections�Audio/Visual�Events�Models

Datacite / DOI

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The “API”

Application Programming Interface

All of these platforms either pull data from, or push data to, an open pipeline of metadata. �(aka the water supply)

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Oh, and most of these organizations are not-for-profit (obviously not Scopus or WoS).

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Let’s try an example.

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I am setting up my ORCID account.

Let’s pretend…

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Within ORCID, I can check against the Crossref and Datacite APIs for any publications matching my name

I want to add my publications!

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It will take me a while to do this the first time, and it’ll only work if my articles have DOIs.

Most publications assign DOIs.

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For all my publications I know are mine, that have DOIs, the metadata is automatically pulled into my ORCID account.

But…

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Now that I have an ORCID, that metadata (ideally) is included when I publish, which means systems will know who I am.

And…!

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Let’s try a more complicated example.

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My institution is using Unsub to get a grasp on where my faculty publishes and how it matches our collections

Let’s pretend…

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The software takes affiliation information from the Microsoft Academic Graph which scrapes publications and uses NLP pattern matching.

Unsub is created and maintained by only two people.

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It then takes that affiliation data and checks against the Crossref API for ISSN and publications, your provided collection, GRID or ROR institutional IDs

Open infrastructure does the heavy lifting…

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… to tell you where your scholars are publishing, if it’s OA (checks against DOAJ and scrapes for policies) and if journals you subscribe to are being published in.

Unsub then uses that data…

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Without the Crossref API, this whole process disappears.

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Publications that aren’t using DOIs are, essentially, “off the grid.”

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Persistent identifiers allow us to see the big picture through all of these connections and interactions.

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When we talk about support for PIDs we’re talking about supporting open infrastructure and free exchange of metadata.

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Thanks, I hope this was not too much (or too fast) to be useful.

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I was Mike Nason,

UNB Libraries and the Public Knowledge Project.