This presentation was provided by Alice Meadows of NISO, at the virtual conference "Future of Scholarly Communication." This event was organized by Zhejiang University Press, and took place on August 5, 2020.

1. Building a Sustainable
Open Research
Infrastructure
Alice Meadows
Director of Community Engagement, NISO
Future of Scholarly Communication” conference
organized by Zhejiang University Press
August 5, 2020
All images Wikimedia unless noted otherwise@alicejmeadows

2. Infrastructure is “the basic
physical and organizational
structures and facilities (eg
buildings, roads, power supplies)
needed for the operation of a
society or an enterprise.”
New Oxford American Dictionary

3. Roads are one of the building blocks of our
everyday infrastructure

4. Research infrastructure
must be equitable

5. Roads come in different shapes and sizes but everyone
can use them

6. Basic building blocks of the research infrastructure are
available to everyone, including persistent identifiers
(PIDs), standards, and more

7. Research infrastructure
must be valued (be seen
to add value)

8. Road infrastructure enables the development of
tools and services for the benefit of all

9. Research infrastructure enables development of
tools and services that benefit everyone involved in
the research process

10. Research infrastructure
must be trusted (and
trustworthy)

11. Infrastructure must be reliable — it must work!
Roads must be maintained or they become
useless, or even dangerous

12. Research infrastructure that doesn’t work causes
frustration, wastes time, and increases the risk of errors

13. Research infrastructure
must be interoperable

14. To be of real value, roads must allow easy
connections with other transportation hubs

15. Research infrastructure must also be interoperable,
not fragmented — to enable seamless information
exchange within and between systems
ORCID slide courtesy of Josh Brown

16. Research infrastructure
must be sustainable

17. Building and maintaining a strong and reliable
infrastructure costs money — someone has to pay

18. Building and supporting a strong and
reliable research infrastructure requires
ongoing investment

19. Research infrastructure
must be community-
driven

20. Infrastructure must be developed to meet
community needs - roads and paths built that
take people where they want and need to go
Both images from Reddit

21. Research infrastructure must be driven by
community needs

22. Research infrastructure
must be open

23. Basic infrastructure must be openly available —
no barriers or fees

24. Basic research infrastructure must be openly
available to users — no barriers or fees

25. “Everything we have gained by opening content
and data will be under threat if we allow the
enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We
propose a set of principles by which Open
Infrastructures to support the research
community could be run and sustained.”
Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1, retrieved
June 27,2020 , http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

26. Examples of open research infrastructure
organizations that meet these requirements

27. I’m going to be focusing on two:
NISO and ORCID

28. Why do we need
information standards?

29. Standards make roads — and the vehicles on
them — work smoothly and safely for
everyone

30. NISO standards
grease the
wheels of
information
creation and
dissemination —
from research to
reader

31. Content distribution was one of
the first industrial processes,
and the first to apply standards
Photo from MAINZ of book
pages

32. Our vision is a world where all can
benefit from the unfettered
exchange of information

33. Our mission is to build knowledge,
foster discussion, and advance
authoritative standards development
through collaboration among the
cultural, scholarly, scientific, and
professional communities

34. • NATIONAL — but operates globally
• INFORMATION — in academia and beyond
• STANDARDS — and best practices
• ORGANIZATION — not for profit,
community-led
What is NISO?

35. • Creates, publishes, and maintains
standards and best practices
• Fosters adoption of existing standards
• Educates the community on information
and technology-related issues
• Incubates thought leadership activities to
advance technology
What does NISO
do?

36. How does NISO work?
● Transparent and open
○ Written procedures and right to appeal
○ All standards are freely available to everyone
● Collaborative and consensus-driven
○ Members vote on new work items, draft proposals, etc
● Equitable
○ We aim for balance between stakeholder groups —
libraries, publishers, service providers
● Inclusive
○ All views are considered, both members and non-
members
● Community-led
○ Elected Board drawn from the membership
○ 500+ volunteers on working groups, committees, etc

37. • Libraries — academic, government,
professional, public, including consortia
• Publishers — commercial and not-for-
profit; books, journals, multimedia;
academic, government, trade; media;
associations
• Service providers/vendors — technology
organizations serving libraries, publishers,
and the wider information community
Who participates?

38. NISO standards include:
• ISSN (now an ISO standard)
• JATS (journal article tagging)
• MECA (manuscript exchange between
systems)
• Seamless Access (improved remote access to
content)
• CRediT(contributor recognition taxonomy) —
in progress
Information
standards

39. Why do we need
persistent
identifiers for
researchers?

40. Road users need reliable signposts and
maps to identify where they are and how
to reach their destination
42.3601° N, 71.0589° W

41. Persistent identifiers in the research
infrastructure reliably identify researchers,
their organizations and outputs

42. ORCID iDs are persistent identifiers for
people, making their research discoverable and
enabling them to get credit for it

43. ORCID’s vision is a world where
all who contribute to research
are uniquely identified and
connected to their affiliations
and works, across disciplines,
borders, and time

44. What is ORCID?
• OPEN — provides open tools and
supports open research
• RESEARCHER — across all disciplines,
organization types, levels, geographies
• (&) CONTRIBUTOR — includes everyone
who contributes to research in any way
• IDENTIFIER — a unique 16-digit number
that can be used by machines and
humans alike

45. What does ORCID do?
• Provides a unique identifier (ORCID iD) for
researchers and an open Registry of these
iDs
• Provides APIs (member and non-member)
to allow exchange of information between
systems
• Enables reliable, researcher-controlled
connections between ORCID iDs and other
persistent identifiers

46. How does ORCID work?
• Free registration for individual users
• Open documentation, FAQ, and 24/5 online
support desk
• Non-members
• Open API, open documentation, open source,
support via user group
• Authenticate iDs, display with works
• Members
• Member API, open documentation, technical/
implementation support from ORCID staff
• Authenticate, display AND connect data to and
from ORCID records and their systems

47. Who participates?
• ~9 million registered users from every
contintent
• ~1,200 members from 45 countries
• Research institutions
• Publishers
• Associations
• Funding organizations
• Vendors/service providers
All numbers as of end June 2020

48. ORCID connections
• ~58 million works
• ~5 million employment affiliations
• 4.6 million + education affiliations
• 2.3 million + peer reviews
• 850,000+ funding activities
• 403,000+ membership and service activities
• 260,000+ invited positions & distinctions
• ~2,000 research resources
All numbers as of end June 2020

49. ORCID + NISO - Standards in Practice

50. CRediT (Contributor Role Taxonomy)
● Identifies individual contributions to research projects
○ 14 roles — Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis;
Funding acquisition; Funding acquisition; Investigation;
Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software;
Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing – original draft;
Writing – review & editing
● Will provide transparency and enable improved attribution,
credit, and accountability
● Use cases:
○ Recognizes research contributions beyond writing and drafting
○ Supports wider research and researcher evaluation
○ Supports identification of potential reviewers, experts, and other
specialists
● Implementation:
○ Begin allocating terms within research outputs
● Approved as NISO project, end 2019, standardization work
in progress

51. We need research infrastructure that is:
● Equitable
● Valued
● Trusted (and trustworthy)
● Interoperable
● Sustainable
● Community-driven
● Open
And we need it to be adopted and used
by the research community globally!

52. You can help!
Please support the research
infrastructure by implementing it,
following best practices,
encouraging your community to
adopt it, sharing your feedback,
identifying gaps, and contributing
to its continuous improvement

53. Thank you!
Questions?
ameadows@niso.org
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2161-3781