I provided the librarian perspective on a panel titled "Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications," at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting, 2016.
3. …We REALLY ❤️ them.
☜ Verso title page
Inside back cover ☞
(not the same book)
4. How Libraries Engage with
Persistent Identifiers
As research supporters:
• Educate students/researchers/faculty to use “permalinks” to licensed/purchased
e-resources – for citations, course readings, etc.
• Specific usage will determine whether we advise using a DOI or a URL that
includes our proxy server information
• Promote our repository as a place where deposited items get a persistent ID
• Help track compliance with funder mandates
As publishers:
• Create DOIs for journal articles and other materials
• Create handles for objects in institutional repositories
• Participate in development work to integrate ORCIDs in repository and
publishing platforms
5. Supporting our Authors:
What’s Missing
• How many Northeastern researchers have…
• A Researcher ID? A SCOPUS ID? An ORCID?
• How do we find this out?
• Not always easy to search by institutional affiliation
…Northeastern University (Boston USA), Northeastern University
(Shenyang, China), North-Eastern Federal University (Yakutsk, Russia),
Northeastern Illinois University, Northeastern Ohio University,
Northeastern State University (Oklahoma), NorthWESTERN University…
• Why do we want to know?
• Outreach to departments with growing disciplinary uptake (grant
applications, journal submissions, etc.)
• Gauging interest/need in a large-scale implementation project
• Supporting interdisciplinary/cross-institutional collaboration
• Reducing duplication of effort in creating researcher profiles
6. How Can We Fix This Problem?
Author
Institution
Identifier System
Publisher
Ranganathan’s fourth law: Save the time of the reader
The OCLC Control Number will reach 1 billion sometime soon
(Punch card in second book – precursor to the barcode)
All joking aside, we are enthusiastic supporters of persistent identifiers, whether they are assigned to people or objects.
As research supporters:
One of my colleagues tells me that people she works with, especially faculty, are thrilled to learn that they can plug a DOI into Zotero and it automatically generates a citation
As publishers:
Create handles – and advocate for their usage rather than the repository-specific URLs that can change (we’re now on our third repository platform in 10 years, so this is a real need)
Participate in development - New ORCID plugin for Hydra, OJS plugin being worked on
We do all this, but we would like to do more!
How do we find this out:
- Common sense would suggest searching the websites of the organizations that create the IDs, but
May not be possible to search if not a subscriber, or functionality may not yet exist
I know from ORCID that I have a Scopus ID, but I have no way of accessing that information as a non-Scopus subscriber
I used Google to search for NU affiliated researchers with ORCIDs but pretty sure I didn’t find them all
While it’s probably possible to get this info from the vendor or system developer, that shouldn’t be necessary (doesn’t help non-affiliates, for example)
Why do we want to know:
Outreach and support is a way for us to add value to the research and publishing process
How can we know ROI on a large-scale project if we don’t know how many would need to be created, how many would benefit, etc.
This is a common problem – a relationship of sorts exists between a researcher and the organization that assigns them an ID, but not between that org and the institution
There is a relationship, automated or otherwise, between the author and the identifier system, and the author and the institution obviously have a relationship, but there is poor access to information about the institution’s authors within the identifier system. An API needs to focus on more than minting a persistent ID, it should also serve a reporting function.
We want to support systems like ORCID, and want to encourage our faculty to sign up, but we also want to be able to track our authors’ uptake.
Librarians don’t like knowing there’s information out there that we can’t access easily!