New KE-Report: Researcher identifiers – National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation

Posted: September 30th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: found on the net, Report | Tags: , | Comments Off on New KE-Report: Researcher identifiers – National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation

250_KE-Report_IdentifierKnowledge Exchange (KE) – a collaboration between five national organisations, DFG – the German Research Foundation, JISC , DEFF – Denmark’s Electronic Research Library, SURF – the ICT organisation for Dutch higher education and research and CSC – the IT Centre for Science in Finland- has just released a new report on research identifiers.

In June 2015, KE brought together representatives from its five member countries for a Knowledge Exchange Workshop on National approaches to ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) implementation. The aim of the workshop was to share national perspectives on ORCID and ISNI, including the challenges, solutions and lessons learned with regards to implementation of ORCID and ISNI on a national scale.

Issues discussed included legal and regulatory challenges, authentication and integration and also outstanding issues of functionality, interoperability, policy and sustainability. This report gives an account of the meeting and presents some outstanding challenges, some possible solutions and begins to take stock and look ahead; what lessons have we learned that should we take into account when moving on to organisational and other identifiers?

The workshop report includes snapshot updates from ORCID, ISNI and the five Knowledge Exchange Partner Countries and addresses challenges and possible solutions and future directions discussed at the meeting. The full report is available on the KE-Website.

Also for many projects in the field of research data management, research identifiers become more and more important. For instance for our EDaWaX-project, research identifiers are crucial in several ways:

  1. First of all, research identifiers facilitate metadata creation for researchers who want to deposit their research data (e.g. by our application for journal’s data archives), which has been used to achieve the results of an empirically-based research paper. Typing errors are prevented and the whole process of metadata creation speeds up.
  2. Second, research identifiers allow to assign to the public name(s) of a researcher a persistent unique identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery.
  3. Third, every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described. This applies to journal articles, working papers but also to research data. By integrating further information (e.g. the affiliation of a researcher) , wich is often available in such authority files, research identifiers also make it possible to list all research outputs of a single institution.

Graphic: Cover and report published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. Cover image: “glow ball” by Philippe Put on flickr.com. License: CC-BY 2.0

 


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