ORCID guest post: unique and persistent identifiers and research data spring

The first research data spring workshop has seen a number of experts from different areas of the research data lifecycle coming together. But what are their thoughts now and how will they continue working with the projects in the coming months? We wanted to share these with you in a series of guest blog posts.

The first one comes from Josh Brown, who talks about the integration of ORCID IDs for researchers. Josh mentions the fairly recent post from Cameron Neylon on open scholarly infrastructure, which is worth a look. At Jisc, we are also conducting a sector-wide consultation on a UK ORCID consortium membership agreement. If you would like to get involved, the consultation is open until the 12th of May.

Thank you Josh for your very helpful comments.

My colleague Will and I were lucky enough to attend the Research Data Spring sandpit workshop in Birmingham in February, and we were both very impressed with the range of ideas that were up for discussion, and the quality of the pitches. I didn’t envy the judging panel at all – I wouldn’t have been able to choose between the project proposals!

It was great to see the organic way that teams that were tackling similar problems got together, and in some cases merged.  The spirit of collaboration and openness that was on display bodes well for the outputs of the Research Data Spring initiative.

There are loads of great ideas coming through, so it’s hard to single projects out for praise. That said, a few projects really got us thinking.  We’re pleased to see that some of the projects coming through to the next phase are integrating persistent identifiers:

It’s not just best practice to use resolvable, persistent, trusted iDs wherever possible. It also enables some awesome new connections between data sources. It would be interesting to see what the team from Extending the Organisational Profile Document (OPD) to cover RDM could make of those connections. Another thought: could capturing ORCID iDs of researchers during large scale user engagement projects such as UCL and the BL’s Enabling complex analysis of large scale digital collections help to track the publications that result from the use of those collections? We’re keen to explore the ways that iDs could be used in other projects.

What excites me about the Research Data Spring is the chance for Jisc and the wider research community to build new and exciting tools, connections and services together, and from the grassroots. This community is a perfect seedbed for innovation and, with the community driving, we can expect to see some truly open and sustainable scholarly infrastructure emerging.

About the author

picture-635-1412167150Josh Brown is the Regional Director for Europe at ORCID. You can contact him via j.brown@orcid-eu.org or find him on twitter @joshbrown_orcid.