Use Of Persistent Identifiers Research Articles

RO-Crates Meets FAIR Digital Objects

RO-Crates makes it easier to package research digital objects together with their metadata so both dependencies and context can be captured. Combined with FAIR good practices such as the use of persistent identifiers, inclusion of license, clear object provenance, and adherence to community standards, RO-crates provides a way to increase FAIRness in science. In this abstract we present the use of RO-Crates, combined with Linked Data best practices, as an implementation for lightweight FAIR Digital Objects, and its possible use in NFDI consortia.

Creating lightweight FAIR Digital Objects with RO-Crate

Creating lightweight FAIR Digital Objects with RO-Crate

Cultivating Resilience in the Biodiversity Heritage Library During the Global Pandemic: Improving access to existing content

The events of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice demonstrations around the world, helped the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) refocus our priorities for implementing our 2020–2025 Strategic Plan, which was adopted in April 2020. BHL’s natural ecosystem relies on virtual coordination across our global community. For this reason, much of the work of the consortium could continue during lockdowns and telework mandates at many of our partner institutions. Though most digitization projects were placed on hold, staff were able to shift priority to metadata enhancements to improve access and discoverability of existing content. Long-planned improvements in the use of persistent identifiers were pushed to the forefront of technical development. Improvements to the data model and user interface to better support born-digital content and articles were also prioritized in the 2021 Technical Priorities. Back-end improvements to the BHL website, currently under development, will also facilitate easier metadata import and updates, making it faster and easier to add article-level metadata, which will improve search and discoverability for articles within the collection. These technical improvements will continue to define BHL as a tool to connect biodiversity data. Part of our collaborative resilience is our ability to adapt and adjust to changing priorities. Over the past year, BHL has been working to review and update our Collection Development Policy. Social justice movements and discussions concerning the harmful content in BHL’s collection are helping to inform the review of our collection development policy in ways we wouldn’t have anticipated prior to 2020. Our review now includes strategies to identify gaps in and improve representation of biodiversity information from underrepresented regions, languages, cultures, and perspectives. We are also working with colleagues to support larger efforts within the library profession to improve and broaden metadata such as subject headings. We will continue to address the problematic historical legacy of natural history collections through actions defined in our strategic plan. The isolation and work from home orders of 2020 and early 2021 provided opportunities for some to expand into deep research and contribute to collaborative projects as work assignments became digital and thus more versatile. For example, transcription projects were accelerated because staff had more time to contribute to these resource-intensive activities. One result of this work is that more handwritten materials such as field notes and correspondence are now available for full-text searching and taxonomic name recognition within BHL. Another strategic goal of BHL is to grow consortial partnerships and alliances to foster cross-institutional collaboration. BHL sought new partnerships that would integrate BHL data into existing and emerging biodiversity projects. This cross-institutional collaboration is another way to cultivate resilience and sow the seeds of sustainability. In this talk, we will describe how BHL shifted its focus to reflect on and respond to global events of 2020. We will share discussions around acknowledging and addressing the harmful legacy content in BHL collections, new technical developments, and examples of collaborative telework projects.

Persistent Identifiers and the Next Generation of Legal Scholarship

The world of scholarly communications has seen distinct growth regarding the use of persistent identifiers in the effort to preserve, disseminate, analyze, and help locate academic content. A persistent identifier is a unique string of letters, numbers, and/or symbols associated with digital content that will never change over time. Persistent identifiers exist in different forms and for different functions, and this Article will discuss the importance and relevance to legal scholarship of two of the most pervasive persistent identifiers in scholarly communications - the digital object identifier (DOI) and the ORCID identifier (ORCID iD). The use of persistent identifiers in academic publishing has become so pervasive that robust, data-driven services have been developed and integrated into the publication process that rely on and leverage this information standard. Publishers of legal scholarship and other legal materials have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, and, as a result, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the variety of benefits offered by this system. In addition, legal scholarship will be left out of future developments and innovations that rely on persistent identifiers to measure impact and other bibliometrics of scholarship. Obtaining disciplinary adoption of persistent identifiers is necessary, prudent, and feasible. This Article will identify existing barriers regarding the implementation of persistent identifiers among publishers of legal scholarship, as well as provide an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals. This Article concludes with a call to action for all stakeholders in legal publishing to adopt persistent identifiers and usher in a new generation for legal scholarship and other legal materials.

Uso de Identificadores Persistentes e Research Blogging por Blogues Científicos em Língua Portuguesa e sua cobertura pela Altmetric

Objetivo: investiga o uso de identificadores persistentes e Research Blogging pela blogosfera científica em língua portuguesa e sua cobertura pela Altmetric por intermédio de um levantamento das citações de artigos em suas postagens.Métodos: Partindo da lista de blogues cadastrados no portal Anel de Blogs Científicos (ABC), foram efetuadas buscas no Google com o objetivo de identificar os blogues em português que citam em suas postagens artigos com identificadores persistentes como o DOI, PMID ou ArXiv, ou que integram a iniciativa Research Blogging que vincula postagens com citações de pesquisas em revistas acadêmicas.Resultados: Os dados sistematizados permitiram realizar consultas no sítio da Altmetric e verificar a sua cobertura. Como resultado levantamos que dos 460 blogues listados no ABC, apenas 109 blogues fizeram citações com identificadores persistentes, 35 participavam da iniciativa Research Blogging e 42 eram mapeados pela Altmetric. Discussões sobre a representatividade dos blogues científicos em português na comunicação científica foram conduzidas com base nos resultados apurados.Conclusões: A falta de padronização das citações em blogues foi apontada como um dos fatores responsáveis pela baixa cobertura dos blogues de língua portuguesa pelo indicador altmétrico. Foi indicada também uma possível ação para minorar esta sub-representação da blogosfera em língua portuguesa.

Persistent, Global, Unique: The three key requirements for a trusted identifier system for physical samples

There is growing recognition that unambiguous citation and tracking of physical samples allows previously impossible linking of samples to data and publications, linking and integration of sample-based observations across data systems, and paves the road towards advanced data mining of sample-based data. And in recent years, there has been an uptake in the use of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for physical samples to support such citation and tracking. The IGSN (International Geo Sample Number) is a PID for physical samples. It was originally developed for the solid earth sciences, and has evolved into an international PID system with members in five continents and a network of active allocating agents. It has been adopted by a growing number and range of stakeholders worldwide, including national geological surveys, research infrastructure providers, collection curators, researchers, and data managers, and by other disciplines that need to refer to physical samples. Nearly 6.9 million samples have been registered with IGSNs so far. The IGSN system uses the Handle System (Kahn and Wilensky 1995; see also Handle.Net®) and has an international organization, IGSN e.V., to manage its governance structure and the technical architecture. The recent expansion of the IGSN beyond the geosciences into other domains such as biodiversity, archeology, and material sciences confirms the power of its concept and implementation, but imposes substantial pressures on the existing capacity and capabilities of the IGSN architecture and its governing organization. Modifications to the IGSN organizational and technical architecture are necessary at this point to keep pace with the growing demand and expectations. These changes are also necessary to ensure trustworthy and sustainable services for PID registration and resolution in a maturing research data ecosystem. The essential criteria for a trustworthy system include an organizational foundation that ensures longevity, sustainability, proper governance, and regular quality assessment of registration services. It also includes a reliable and secure technical platform, based on open standards, which is sufficiently scalable and flexible to accommodate the growing diversity of specimen types, use cases, and stakeholder requirements. In 2018, a major planning project for the IGSN was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. An international group of experts participates in re-designing and improving the existing organization and technical architecture of the IGSN system, revising the current business model of the IGSN e.V. and professionalizing its operations. The goal is for the IGSN system to be able to respond to, and support in a sustainable manner, the rapidly growing demands of a global and increasingly multi-disciplinary user community, and to ensure that the IGSN will be a trustworthy, stable, and adaptable persistent identifier system for material samples, both technically and organizationally. The end result should also satisfy and facilitate participation across research domains, and will be a reliable component of the evolving research data ecosystem. Finally, it will ensure that the IGSN is recognized as a trusted partner by data infrastructure providers and the science community alike.

OpenVIVO: Transparency in Scholarship

OpenVIVO is a free and open hosted semantic web platform open to anyone that gathers and shares open data about scholarship around the world. OpenVIVO, based on the VIVO open source platform, provides transparent access to data about the scholarly work of its participants. OpenVIVO demonstrates the use of persistent identifiers, automatic real-time ingest of scholarly ecosystem metadata, use of VIVO-ISF and related ontologies, attribution of work, and publication and reuse of data – all critical components of presenting, preserving, and tracking scholarship. The system was created by a cross-institutional team over the course of three months. The team created and used RDF models for research organizations in the world based on Digital Science GRID data, for academic journals based on data from CrossRef and the US National Library of Medicine, and created a new model for attribution of scholarly work. All models, data, and software are available in open repositories.

Editorial: 20 Years of Persistent Identifiers – Applications and Future Directions

Persistent identifiers (PID) have existed for more than 20 years and have become well established as a means for identifying literature and data on the web. They were invented to address the problem of disappearing internet links, also known as “link rot”, which was seen as undermining the emerging digital record of science. A number of PID systems have since been developed, and their utility for the management of the scientific record has been reviewed. Since the initial launch of the Handle System, we have seen many more uses for persistent identification, besides literature and data. A session at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2016 was dedicated to ‘20 years of persistent identifiers – where do we go next?’ A number of contributions from this session have since been developed into full papers that form this Data Science Journal Special Collection, with additional solicited contributions. Together, these papers give us an overview of the use of persistent identifiers in research information infrastructures and possible future directions.

Identifiers for Earth Science Data Sets: Where We Have Been and Where We Need to Go

Considerable attention has been devoted to the use of persistent identifiers for assets of interest to scientific and other communities alike over the last two decades. Among persistent identifiers, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) stand out quite prominently, with approximately 133 million DOIs assigned to various objects as of February 2017. While the assignment of DOIs to objects such as scientific publications has been in place for many years, their assignment to Earth science data sets is more recent. Applying persistent identifiers to data sets enables improved tracking of their use and reuse, facilitates the crediting of data producers, and aids reproducibility through associating research with the exact data set(s) used. Maintaining provenance – i.e., tracing back lineage of significant scientific conclusions to the entities (data sets, algorithms, instruments, satellites, etc.) that lead to the conclusions, would be prohibitive without persistent identifiers. This paper provides a brief background on the use of persistent identifiers in general within the US, and DOIs more specifically. We examine their recent use for Earth science data sets, and outline successes and some remaining challenges. Among the challenges, for example, is the ability to conveniently and consistently obtain data citation statistics using the DOIs assigned by organizations that manage data sets.

Publikuotų dokumentų sklaidos skaitmeninėje erdvėje metodologiniai ir technologiniai aspektai: Nacionalinės bibliografijos duomenų banko pridedamoji vertė

Straipsnio objektas – Lietuvos ir su Lietuva susijusių publikuotų dokumentų teikimo į skaitmeninę erdvę raida nuo 1992 iki 2016 metų. Pagrindiniai sisteminiai mūsų šalies publikuotų dokumentų pasklidimo skaitmeninėje erdvėje veiksniai buvo bibliografinės apskaitos pertvarka, sukūrusi efektyvesnės sklaidos priemones informacijai apie mūsų šalies istorinį, politinį, socialinį ir ekonominį gyvenimą bei kultūros paveldo skaitmeninimo, grindžiamo atminties institucijų sąveika, įgyvendinimas mūsų šalyje, sudaręs prielaidas kurti vientisą publikuotų dokumentų skaitmeninį turinį ir bendrą prieigą prie jo. Šioje publikacijoje pagrindinis dėmesys skiriamas bibliografinės apskaitos pertvarkai, sukūrus Nacionalinės bibliografijos duomenų banką (NBDB), kuris sudarė geresnes informacijos apie Lietuvos ir su Lietuva susijusius dokumentus sklaidos skaitmeninėje erdvėje galimybes. Publikacijoje panaudota Europos Komisijos elektroninės leidybos pridedamosios vertės grandinės koncepcija, procesų vadybos teorija bei kokybinė turinio analizės metodologija, kurios leidžia konceptualizuoti ir vertinti NBDB sukauptą turinį ir paslaugas. Sukūrus teorinį verčių kūrimo modelį, grįstą teisiniais dokumentais, aptariamos socialinio, kultūros, inovacijų ir finansinio kapitalo pridedamosios vertės. Kitam sisteminiam veiksniui, nulėmusiam publikuotų dokumentų atsiradimą skaitmeninėje erdvėje – dokumentų skaitmeninimui ir vieningos prieigos kūrimui, bus parengta atskira publikacija. Šiame straipsnyje remiamasi Nacionalinėje Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekoje įgyvendintų projektų, kuriems vadovavo šio straipsnio autorė, rezultatais.

Supporting Data Citation: Experiences and Best Practices of a DOI Allocation Agency for Social Sciences

INTRODUCTION As more and more research data becomes better and more easily available, data citation gains in importance. The management of research data has been high on the agenda in academia for more than five years. Nevertheless, not all data policies include data citation, and problems like versioning and granularity remain. SERVICE DESCRIPTION da|ra operates as an allocation agency for DataCite and offers the registration service for social and economic research data in Germany. The service is jointly run by GESIS and ZBW, thereby merging experiences on the fields of Social Sciences and Economics. The authors answer questions pertaining to the most frequent aspects of research data registration like versioning and granularity as well as recommend the use of persistent identifiers linked with enriched metadata at the landing page. NEXT STEPS The promotion of data sharing and the development of a citation culture among the scientific community are future challenges. Interoperability becomes increasingly important for publishers and infrastructure providers. The already existent heterogeneity of services demands solutions for better user guidance. Building information competence is an asset of libraries, which can and should be expanded to research data.

DOI for geoscience data - how early practices shape present perceptions

The first minting of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for research data happened in 2004 in the context of the project “Publication and citation of primary scientific data” (STD-DOI). Some of the concepts and perceptions about DOI for data today have their roots in the way this project implemented DOI for research data and the decisions made in those early days still shape the discussion about the use of persistent identifiers for research data today. This project also laid the foundation for a tighter integration of journal publications and data. Promoted by early adopters, such as PANGAEA, DOI registration for data has reached a high level of maturity and has become an integral part of scientific publishing. This paper discusses the fundamental concepts applied in the identification of DOI for research data and how these can be interpreted for alternative and future applications of persistent identifiers for research data.

Adventures in data citation: sorghum genome data exemplifies the new gold standard.

Scientific progress is driven by the availability of information, which makes it essential that data be broadly, easily and rapidly accessible to researchers in every field. In addition to being good scientific practice, provision of supporting data in a convenient way increases experimental transparency and improves research efficiency by reducing unnecessary duplication of experiments. There are, however, serious constraints that limit extensive data dissemination. One such constraint is that, despite providing a major foundation of data to the advantage of entire community, data producers rarely receive the credit they deserve for the substantial amount of time and effort they spend creating these resources. In this regard, a formal system that provides recognition for data producers would serve to incentivize them to share more of their data.The process of data citation, in which the data themselves are cited and referenced in journal articles as persistently identifiable bibliographic entities, is a potential way to properly acknowledge data output. The recent publication of several sorghum genomes in Genome Biology is a notable first example of good data citation practice in the field of genomics and demonstrates the practicalities and formatting required for doing so. It also illustrates how effective use of persistent identifiers can augment the submission of data to the current standard scientific repositories.

Criteria for the Trustworthiness of Data Centres

The use of persistent identifiers to identify data sets as part of the record of science implies that the data objects are persistent themselves. Scientific findings, historical documents and cultural achievements are to a rapidly increasing extent being presented in electronic form - in many cases exclusively so. However, besides the invaluable advantages offered by this form, it also carries serious disadvantages. The rapid obsolescence of the technology required to read the information combined with the frequently imperceptible physical decay of the media themselves represents a serious threat to preservation of the information content. Since research projects only run for a relatively short period of time, it is advisable to shift the burden of responsibility for long-term data curation from the individual researcher to a trusted data repository or archive. But what makes a data repository trustworthy? The trustworthiness of a digital repository can be tested and assessed on the basis of a criteria catalogue. These catalogues can also be used as a basis to develop a procedure for auditing and certification of the trustworthiness of digital repository.

Information supply beyond text: non‐textual information at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) – challenges and planning

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the work being done at The German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) to make non‐textual information, for example three dimensional objects, more easily accessible. The goal is to create workflows and develop tools that allow academic libraries to treat this data in the same way as textual documents within the library processing chain. This implies content‐based indexing and the offering of new kinds of interfaces for searching and displaying results.Design/methodology/approachThe work of TIB on non textual information is described as well as DataCite and its launch in December 2009.FindingsThat the launch of Datacite ensures that this agency will take global leadership for promoting the use of persistent identifiers for datasets, to satisfy the needs of scientists. It will, through its members, establish and promote common methods, best practices, and guidance.Practical implicationsThe work of TIB and the launch of Datacite will ensure that non textual data will become more easily available to researchers.Originality/valueThe value of this work has been underlined recently with the controversy over the accessibility of climate change data.