Showing posts with label scholarly communication. Show all posts

Saturday, March 08, 2025

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and thier role in supporting scholarly communication

Terms like Digital Object Identifier (DOI), OCID, International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) are common in academic community. These all are Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).

What is Persistent identifier (PID)?

A PID (Persistent Identifier) helps to identify and locate an entity regardless of its hosting or publication location, ensuring its clear and lasting identification. PIDs play a crucial role in the research ecosystem by connecting researchers and their research outputs to the underlying data and related metadata.

Persistent Identifier includes two words, Persistent refers to anything which is long lasting, unbreakable and reliable. An identifier is a label which gives a unique name to an entity: a person, place, or thing.

As described in The Digital Preservation Handbook "A persistent identifier is a long-lasting reference to a digital resource. Typically it has two components: a unique identifier; and a service that locates the resource over time even when it's location changes. The first helps to ensure the provenance of a digital resource ( that it is what it purports to be), whilst the second will ensure that the identifier resolves to the correct current location."

The examples of PIDs include

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): It is a persistent identifiers for things or entities such as journal articles, books, and datasets. Crossref and DataCite are the main organizations assigning DOIs for these purposes in scholarly communication.

OCID: a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals. An ORCID iD is an example of a persistent identifier for a person. ORCID works closely with Crossref, DataCite and many other PID organizations to build trusted connections between ORCID iDs and other identifiers.

International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI): This identifier provides information about the institution where a researcher worked while the research was undertaken.

Importance of PIDs in the scholarly system

Discoverability: PIDs such as DOIs, ORCID iDs, RRIDs, ROR IDs, and Funder IDs make data more easily discoverable by providing unique, permanent identifiers.

Accessibility: PIDs link research outputs to their underlying data and associated metadata, making it easier to discover and access research data.

Interoperability: Incorporating PIDs in research outputs ensures that data follows established standards, making it more interoperable with existing and future systems.

Reusability: PIDs facilitate the reuse of research data or protocols by enabling researchers to easily cite and credit the sources of their data and protocols.

Machine-Actionable Data: PIDs enable data to be processed and understood by machines or software, enhancing the efficiency of data and metadata processing.

Reproducibility and Transparency: PIDs play a critical role in ensuring the reproducibility and transparency of research data by enabling researchers to uniquely identify and cite their research resources.

Integration of Data: PIDs facilitate the integration of data from multiple sources, enabling researchers to make new discoveries that would not be possible without PIDs.

FAIR Data Principles: By incorporating PIDs in their research outputs, researchers contribute to making their data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR data principles) as required by many funders and publishers.

Open Data Ecosystem: PIDs support the open data ecosystem by ensuring the unique identification, citation, and linking of research outputs to their underlying data and associated metadata.

DataCite Commons and power of PID

DataCite Commons was developed as part of the EC-funded project Frey. The users of the DataCite Commons will have easier access to information about the use of their DOIs and can discover and track connections between their DOIs and other entities and also shows the connections between content with DOIs and people, research organizations, and funders that are together called the PID Graph of scholarly resources identified via persistent identifiers (PIDs) and connected in standard ways.

Recent advances in (PIDs) and their application in scholarly communication

Creating an ANSI/NISO standard to enhance utility of PIDs in scholarly system

Recently in a report of the Open Research Funders Group “Developing a US National PID Strategy” in March 2024. It highlighted that a strategy is required to build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. Based on the principles addressed in the report while also further developing other elements, this Working Group will create a standard for advancing PIDs and open scholarship.

Finally, Research Data Alliance-United States (RDA-US) has collaborated with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to develop a US national PID strategy. This initiative aims to create an ANSI/NISO standard. The Standard will guide the adoption and integration of PIDs in research workflows. By doing so, it seeks to build support for PIDs, streamline their implementation, and enhance their utility across the scholarly ecosystem.

RDA-US will contribute expertise in PID implementation and community engagement, while NISO will oversee the Working Group’s operations and coordination. Leaders from both organizations express confidence that this initiative will significantly strengthen the US research infrastructure by providing clear guidance on PID adoption.

This collaboration underscores the growing recognition of PIDs as critical tools for ensuring the integrity, accessibility, and interoperability of research outputs in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.

The DOI for Scholarly Publishing: winner of the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact

NISO in association with The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has recently in February of this year announced the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact. Named in honor of Bruce Rosenblum, the award celebrates innovations that have transformed the scholarly publishing ecosystem, focusing on technologies, standards, or practices that have become indispensable to its operation, and its inaugural winner is the DOI for Scholarly Publishing. Bruce Rosenblum was known for his expertise in developing Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and championing XML standards. He played a critical role in the development of the JATS and STS standards and advocated for persistent identifiers, semantic tagging, high-quality metadata, and industry standards.

Since its adoption by Crossref, the DOI for Scholarly Publishing has been critical for ensuring research objects are discoverable, even if web structures change or content moves. DOI metadata facilitates other information management systems such as holdings and appropriate-copy resolution via related standards like OpenURL. DOI metadata facilitates other information management systems such as holdings and appropriate-copy resolution via related standards like OpenURL.

The initiative involved collaboration by five sponsoring organizations: NISO, ALPSP, AUPresses, SSP, and STM. The Award Governance Committee is made up of leaders from these organizations, and there are representatives forming the Award Planning and Piloting Committee.

References:

Open Scholarly Communication: both authors and readers enjoy the benefits

LibCognizance Open Access , Open access Journals

Common methods of scholarly communication are publishing research papers/articles, book reviews, primarily in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and books. Besides papers/ articles, book reviews, the other textual formats of communicating information are: Preprints, working papers, reports, encyclopedias, dictionaries, sound, and video recordings, data visualization formats, blogs, and discussion forums, etc.

ACRL (2003) defines it as “Scholarly communication is the system through which research findings and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the research community, and preserved for future use.”1

Open Scholarly communications

The word “Open” in open scholarly communication denotes the open access of scholarly communication. The knowledge which is open to all for free without any restrictions. It is available to the wider scholarly community to use for the sustainable development of society. Generally Open access involves making scholarly information available free of charge, immediately and in an on-line format.

On the page of Roger Williams University, "Open Access in Scholarly Communications" is defined as "opening up the research process for quicker dissemination of research findings and rapid discovery by making scholarly information available online, free and unrestricted.”2

According to Bohyun Kim (2021) “Open scholarship aims at producing transparent and accessible knowledge by sharing research outputs in various types for access and reuse by others from that sharing.”3

It is the process of publishing and sharing the research findings of researchers to be available to the wider research community and beyond that. The aim is to contribute to the sustainable development of society by keeping close relationships between teaching and research and through the pursuit, dissemination, and application of knowledge. The benefits of Open Scholarly Communications are enjoyed by both authors and readers.

https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/principlesstrategies
https://www.rwu.edu/library/help-and-services/information-faculty/scholarly-communication-open-access/open-access-scholarly-communication
https://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/Technology-and-Power/Open-Technologies- for-Open-Knowledge-146632.shtml

Principles of Scholarly Communication Services:

These principles aim to ensure that the Scholarly Communication Services should be open, transparent and support the core values of scholarship. As we know that future research needs the fundamental base of previous research, that needs to be communicated to all research communities beyond any geographical, financial or personal interests. Scholarly communication should always be in the very interest of Scholarship.

In September 2017, COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) pledged to collaborate with others on the same issue and published a joint statement and accordingly,

COAR and SPARC have developed seven Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services.1

These principles are based on the the "Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure"2 developed by Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015)

https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/good-practice-principles-for-scholarly-communication-services-2/

Initiatives to support Open Scholarly Communications:

Open Access Week: It is an annual scholarly communication event that occurs across the world in the month of October. It includes talks, seminars, symposia, or the announcement focusing on Open access and related topics. "http://www.openaccessweek.org/"

Open Access Initiative: The Budapest Open Access Initiative gave momentum to the Open Scholarly communication. It came in to existence after a meeting held in Budapest by Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations [OSF]) on December 1-2, 2001. The aim was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.

Open Access repositories: OAR lead to open scholarly communication as they collect, preserve, and provide free access to articles and research papers. Open Access repositories may be discipline-based or institution-based also there are preprints repositories like arXiv, medRxiv, openly accessible to all . Over 2500 repositories are listed in the OpenDoar (a global directory of Open Access Repositories).

Publishing Open Acess Journals: To make scholarly content openly available to the public, many institutions host peer reviewed journals, as well as teaching materials and book series through a software "Open Journal Systems" (OJS). It is a collaborative, open source software project maintained by the Public Knowledge Project. Publishing in Gold and Green Open access journals and PlanS (an initiative for Open Access Publishing) share one aim of making scholarly publication available freely to all.

Open educational resources (OER): Textbooks, course readings, and a wide range of other learning content that are created with the intention of being freely available to users anywhere. They are copyrightable works licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R’s of Openness: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): DOAJ is a community-driven database of over 15 000 peer-reviewed open access journals from all the countries and in all languages covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

CrossRef: It is a community-driven, not-for-profit membership organization that aims to make scholarly communication better. Crossref is registered as Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA) in New York, USA.

MOU between DOAJ and Crossref:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and CrossReference run by Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 22, 2021.

The agreement will enable:

Rapid and easy discovery of contents of the journals indexed in DOAJ through the use of CrossRef metadata.
Exchange of services and information on various issues of technical and strategic matters between both organizations.
Coordination in developing training materials, new services and features.
New research to find out practical and technical issues in Journals and metadata covered by each organization.
Sharing strategies, data and resources in order to lower barriers for emerging publishers across the world.
Encourage an open, fair and fully inclusive future for scholarly communication.

Role of Libraries in Open Scholarly Communication:

Academic and research libraries are also increasingly recognizing the importance of Open Scholarly Communication and supporting open access of scholarly communication by launching institutional repositories, creating open access publishing funds, formulating institute open access policies. Libraries are providing support to students, faculty, and administration in Scholarly Publishing (manuscript preparation, formatting, journal submission). They now play an important role in the dissemination of research outputs and have emerged as a Liaison Librarians, open access ambassadors and open access policy makers, metadata providers, etc.

Open availability of scholarly material can have a significant impact on education, health and innovation and can be of benefit to the society in their overall development.

References:

ACRL (2003). Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1. retrieved [April 10, 2022], https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/principlesstrategies
Roger Williams University. Open Access in Scholarly Communication, retrieved [April09, 2022], https://www.rwu.edu/library/help-and-services/information-faculty/scholarly-communication-open-access/open-access-scholarly-communication
Bohyun Kim (2021). Open Technologies for Open Knowledge. Online Searcher, Volume 45, Number 3 - May/June 2021, retieved [April 03, 2022] https://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/Technology-and-Power/Open-Technologies- for-Open-Knowledge-146632.shtml
COAR and SPARC (2019) Good practice principles for Open Scholarly Communication, retrieved [April 09, 2022], https://sparcopen.org/our-work/good-practice-principles-for-scholarly-communication-services/
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1, retrieved [April 08, 2022], http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.131485

To know more:

A boost in open scholarly communication with MOU between DOAJ and CrossRef

LibCognizance Metadata , Metadata standards

Taking Open Access and Scholarly Communications to the next level, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 22, 2021.