Relevance to the UK Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

This meeting follows a series of six meetings of crucial institutional, high-level, strategic and administrative stakeholders in the UK Higher Education sector, the Researcher ID (ResID) Task and Finish Group. This group has been organised by the JISC, which has been represented on the group by programme managers as well as by Brian Kelly and Talat Chaudhri of the ISC at UKOLN. It aims to meet once more in order to present its findings, having achieved a broad consensus amongst those stakeholders and having funded, agreed and published a series of reports and statements of principle. However, the Knowledge Exchange Digital Author Identifier (KEDAI) summit (tweets archived here and notes in this post by Brian Kelly) represents a wider international group interested in the same issues, and the ResID group has expressed a strong interest in developing UK support for researcher ID schemes firmly within the broader international perspective. The ResID group had, broadly speaking, supported the ORCID identifier scheme, which is in early development, since it is being built on just such an international basis and has buy-in and financial support from governmental organisations, worldwide higher education institutions and international publishers. The KEDAI summit, however, did not unambiguously throw its weight behind ORCID. Unlike the ResID group, which could be seen to have understood the competing International Standard Names Identifier (ISNI) as one of a host of many identifiers that would be linked by a single ORCID identifier for each researcher or author, the KEDAI summit, after much discussion, identified both ORCID and ISNI as potential solutions, although recognising that other possibilities could arise and should not be ruled out either at this early stage. Consequently, it will be necessary for the UK members of the ResID group who attended KEDAI to report back and for the group as a whole to re-think some of its findings.

Discussions and Consensus Building

The meeting was extremely successful in clarifying the roles of the possible international players and interest groups in this space, along with the likely sources of conflict that might need to be mitigated in order for any scheme to succeed. In addition to those mentioned above, VIAF, RePEc, CrossRef, TROVE (in Australia) and VIVO (principally in the US and Australia) were factored into the discussions, which were in large part led by Andrew Treloar (Australian National Data Service), Cliff Lynch (CNI), Bas Cordewener (SURF, Knowledge Exchange) and Rachel Bruce (JISC). Other names amongst many that deserve an honorable mention here include, but are not limited to, Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento), Josh Brown (JISC), Nicky Ferguson (Clax Ltd., and author of ResID reports for JISC), Andrew MacEwan (British Library), Mogens Sandfær (DTIC), Chris Shillum (Elsevier) and Maurice Vanderfeesten (SURF).

There were considerable discussions of issues of scope, i.e. who should have an identifier, the differences between authors, researchers, academics and others who could in certain contexts require such an identifier. A great deal of time was devoted to the benefits and financial motivations for developing such infrastructure, which it was agreed were considerable in all of the countries represented – however, the range of use cases are so broad that it is currently difficult to make generalisations about financial incentives: each use case would have its own specific business case, so no single business case can be developed; it is so early in the development of both ORCID and ISNI (amongst others) that only a broad-brush discussion of benefits could be had. All the same, it was agreed that these benefits, in general terms, were so substantial and of such wide applicability within academia internationally, that the case for a single international identifier scheme, whatever that may end up being, was agreed unambiguously and unanimously by the attendees. It was regarded as a major risk to fail in this process, since the likely result would be a series of commercial identifier solutions lacking interoperability, as to some extent already exist today in Web of Science, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar, none of which unambiguously identify authors well at present.

Issues Arising and Differences of Approach

There were, of course, differences. Most notably, there were issues of control. Some argued that it is academics who should have control over their own identifiers, which is the basis upon which the ORCID development is proceeding, albeit with a dose of realism: the data will need to be bulk-loaded by institutions and curated by them whenever an individual academic does not choose to take control over their identifier and associated data. On the other hand, the ISNI data, via the VIAF database, is collected by institutions on a model more familiar to traditional library and research reporting approaches, although this does not mean that there is never a role, lower down in the process, for individuals to correct their own data and take control of it. There are international differences in terms of privacy legislation that will need to be taken account of. In Norway, for example, national security numbers are now public information, whereas in the UK they are considered private. The same could be said even of tax returns in different jurisdictions.

Perhaps the greatest area of uncertainty was over the level of semantic information that needed to be attached to an identifier in order for it to be disambiguated, and whether too much information would effectively turn it into yet another silo of information, unconnected to other similar data silos, as Paolo Bouquet convincingly argued. One alternative view in the ORCID group, as Chris Shillum reported (although not his own view) is that semantic information additional to the lowest level required for author identification will be required in order to create added-value services capable of incentivising the take-up and use of the identifiers by academics in practice: without this, the identifier scheme would be, according to this view, an expensive white elephant, unused by the academics whose institutions had registered them. While it was agreed by all that such added-value services were crucial, the opposing view was that they ought to be kept separate from the identifier scheme that they relied on. Paolo Bouquet won considerable support in maintaining the view that ORCID, for example, should aim at a “thin layer” of interoperability based on a minimum of semantic information attached to each identifier. For example, institutional affiliations can change over time, and require date-stamping: if this were to be included, the identifier scheme would quickly be overburdened; if only the registering institution were included, it would be the source of frequent misleading information about earlier or later publications written elsewhere.

Future Work on Identifiers

One telling discussion occurred on the first day, on this subject, about the broader scope of identifier schemes: specifically organisational identifiers. It was quickly agreed that, while this is a critically important area in future, it is of little use creating organisational identifier schemes when even individual researchers, academics or other authors cannot be uniquely identified. It remains to be seen whether such organisational identifier schemes will be necessary, although this seems likely, and to what extent it will be possible to keep much of the metadata in dispersed stores across institutions rather than overburden the identifier scheme as was discussed with regard to identifiers for individuals. Unlike ISNI, which is a “top-down” initiative, ORCID represents a “bottom-up” approach where authors make claims or assertions about themselves. In phase 1 of ORCID, there will only be self-assertions, whereas Phase 2 is planned to include verification by institutions, publishers, funders and other authorities. It could be said that even this represents a substantial broadening of the metadata that is required to make an identifier scheme function effectively, despite being clearly very useful as an added service.

Summary

Overall, it was agreed in general that it was very useful, if not critical, for a broad coalition of international partners and national interests to set out broad principles and guidance in this way, as agreed at KEDAI, for developers of author and/or researcher identifier schemes to follow. It was further agreed that, although the technical difficulty of producing such a scheme is in fact low, it is nonetheless far from easy to produce one that will succeed in practice because of the huge range of stakeholders, international governance organisations and interests, both public sector and commercial, that need to be able to use the scheme effectively in order for it to succeed. As a consequence, previous schemes have not succeeded. Lastly, and most significantly of all, researchers and academics themselves have to see a reason to use any identifier scheme as a necessary and gainful part of their employment in a way that substantially benefits research and human knowledge but also helps individuals in their daily workflows. The attendees agreed that this, above all, was the key criterion of success.

Introducing Technical Foundations

The Technical Foundations web site is an important developing strand of ISC activities at UKOLN. It is aimed at those involved in technical innovation in the higher and further education sectors in the UK, and features a growing collection of resources to support the selection and use of information standards and technologies. It is intended to provide an authoritative overview and synthesis of a wide range of technical subjects of interest to the JISC community, principally in the UK HE sector. It seeks to build on cutting-edge developments in information science in the UK HE sector, developing practical information on these areas as they become increasingly mature.

Who is it for?

It aims to serve research managers, researchers, early adopters, developers, and ultimately the whole UK HE sector from a technical perspective: the entire JISC community.

Who is working on it?

The Technical Foundations work will involve an increasing number of people, both within the UKOLN ISC and the JISC and from outside. These will be both contributors and expert reviewers of the content in specialist areas. Our hope is that people across the sector will become involved, so please contact us if you have any suggestions or contributions to make as the site develops.

This work is being co-ordinated by Talat Chaudhri (introduction and staff page here).

What do we do?

In order to make Technical Foundations work, we have recognised that technical information comes from a variety of sources and people working in different roles across the sector have valuable contributions to make. That means that we have to build content for Technical Foundations that is able to evolve as expertise in developing areas matures over time.

As you might expect, the process starts off by collecting and bringing together disparate sources of information from across the Web. In addition to having staff who monitor develops in specific areas, other specific inputs include blogs and the JISC Observatory. We will maintain our own blog to make initial reports on areas of interest to the sector. The next stage is to produce guidance notes about the issues that are being faced, the ways in which people are trying to solve them and the possible approaches that could be used. The form these brief guidance notes may take will vary from topic to topic, and they do not have to be comprehensive. This content will need to be flexible, following the needs of each particular developing area.

Lastly, when a particular topic reaches sufficient maturity for us to develop this content into a more mature synthesis, we will produce topic pages outlining the background and providing an introduction to a topic, the current usage of technologies in that area, and the issues that are being faced, together with solutions and approaches to any problems that are arising. We will include the broadest possible variety of views and perspectives from those who have already engaged with these technologies, especially people who are developing them right now.

We will make sure that this content goes through a robust quality assurance exercise from people who know what is going on in these areas, so that you can trust the information we provide. You will be able to see how up-to-date each topic page is.

It is the mission of Technical Foundations to keep all this information up-to-date and to cover cutting-edge developments, so it is always a relevant and attractive resource, both to experts and to newcomers to the topics that we cover.

How far have we got?

The site is in development: draft content on a number of topics is already available, pending quality assurance by expert reviewers in each specific area – and more will follow soon. There are already some guidance notes for topics in early-stage development. Please contact us if you have any suggestions. We will be carrying out further phases of consultation on the topic-based content and on the usability of the user interface of the site. There are also quite a number of blog posts on the blog, so we would encourage you to subscribe and comment on what we have written.

Talat Chaudhri works as a research officer within the ISC. In this role, Talat’s primary responsibility is to develop the Technical Foundations Web site for the JISC, which provides accessible, cutting-edge, cross-sector synthesis on a range of technical subjects for the JISC community. This work includes technical development on a Drupal platform as well as editorial control over the content of the site. On the content side, this includes writing topic pages, blog posts and other technical synthesis where these fall within his specific expertise, and otherwise commissioning content and assisting contributors. He is currently developing a robust quality assurance process, including feedback and review mechanisms, in order to consult the leading technical experts in particular topic areas and to ensure that the technical content of the site remains up-to-date.

Talat has a background in institutional repositories and metadata, as a former repository manager in Aberystwyth University, and has experience of repository strategy, policy, copyright issues and licencing. He has developed his interest in Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and Research Information Management (RIM) further since he joined UKOLN in 2008, particularly in 2010-11 when he worked on the CERIFy project.

At present, Talat is part of the Researcher IDs Task and Finish Group, along with Brian Kelly, on which the UKOLN ISC provides support to the JISC. The group is due to report in early 2012 on a UK-wide strategy for unique researcher identifiers; it currently includes representatives of the JISC, the UKOLN ISC, the UK Research Councils and HESA, and is also in dialogue with HEFCE and the Wellcome Trust. This role has links with Talat’s role in developing the Technical Foundations Web site and his wider experience in Research Information Management and institutional repositories.

From 2008 to 2010, Talat worked on the Application Profiles Support Project. He is co-moderator of the Dublin Core Scholarly Communications community with Rosemary Russell, and is on the Dublin Core Advisory Board. He is also a member of the JISC Observatory team.