06/21/2021

Why Publishers Should Care About Persistent Identifiers

Many publishers aren’t realizing the full potential of PIDs

Today’s post is the first of two in which we look at the state of persistent identifiers and what they mean for publishers—to coincide with the first meeting, on June 21, of the new UK Research Identifier National Coordinating Council (RINCC) and publication the same day of a Cost Benefit Analysis Report, funded by the UK Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for Open Access project. 

Over the last few years, there has been significant progress in developing recommendations, policies, and procedures for creating, promoting, and using persistent identifiers (PIDs). PIDapalooza, the flagship conference for PID providers and users, is now five years old and continues to grow. A number of funders and national research organizations are developing their own PID roadmaps, like the one from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the UK National PID Consortium. And the more established PID providers (Crossref, ORCID, DataCite), are being joined by new and emerging organizations and initiatives. These include the increasingly widely adopted Research Organization Registry (ROR), a community-led open identifier for research institutions; and the Research Activity Identifier (RAiD), an early-stage project, led by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) that is a container ID for research projects. In addition, Crossref themselves are working with funders to register DOIs for awarded grants.

Publishers — and publishing system providers — were early and enthusiastic adopters of persistent identifiers. Crossref was originally founded by a group of competing publishers to address citation linking in online publications, and the vast majority of their current 14,000 or so members are publishing organizations. ORCID’s founders also included several publishers and, while only 83 of the currently more than 1,100 members are publishers, you could argue that they punch above their weight, since ORCID iDs are used more often in journal publishing workflows than any other. Most major manuscript submission systems have ORCID integrations, and upwards of 2,000 journals now require ORCID IDs for the contributing author, with thousands more requesting them. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.