Knowledge Exchange Digital Author Identifier Summit
For a meeting held in the grounds of the former Royal Mint near the Tower of London, it was probably appropriate that at lot of the discussion on the first day of the Digital Author Identifier Summit should focus on the financial aspects of building identifier systems for researchers and/or authors. An international group representing digital infrastructure specialists and people involved in building identifier systems are looking at the requirements of researchers, institutions, funders and publishers in this rapidly-evolving field. The meeting has been convened by the Knowledge Exchange, a Danish/Dutch/German/British grouping of institutions interesting in using technology to improve access to research materials.
It is interesting to see how the discussion has moved on since March 2009, when many of the participants in this meeting met in Amsterdam to begin discussions in this area. Existing systems have matured since then, and back in March 2009 no-one had heard of ORCID.
Several points came up yesterday which I think are worth mentioning here. One was the notion that different users of author identifier systems have different requirements in terms of the quality and completeness of the data in those systems. So a service which covers 80% of researchers might have enough to be useful for a range of other services, even though it is not complete.
Participants were asked to imagine that they had a magic wand and could grant three wishes in relation to DAIs. Common themes quickly appeared: openness of the data was an oft-mentioned priority – the information needs to be freely available in order to build other useful services on top of it. Other popular choices were the importance of having a single identifier for an author at an international level and an agreed way of aligning national identifier services with international ones. It was agreed that the benefits to the individuals being identified should be easily demonstrated to ensure their engagement.
Group discussions in the afternoon focused on the role of DAIs from the viewpoint of suppliers of information, those needing the data and those in charge of working out how the systems should be overseen. One interesting point from the reporting of these groups was the general acceptance that digital author identifier systems are ‘resistant to traditional business models’ (Cliff Lynch) and ideally should be funded as elements of infrastructure. This is mainly because the data held in the systems needs to be freely available for re-use to make the most of having them (and to create the ‘frictionless sharing’ and ‘bridges of trust’ which were mentioned in the meeting), but no-one is expecting individual researchers or authors to pay a fee in order to register their identifier.
Today the discussion will move on to analysing opportunities and challenges in issues of governance, interoperability and added value and maybe come up with some actions for members of this international group to take on.
[...] agreed and scalable way that has not hitherto been achieved. The first day (see this blog post by Amanda Hill of the Names Project) was devoted to information sharing and consensus building, [...]