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Open Science governance: the role of persistent identifiers and metadata standards

Authors : Isabel Abedrapo Rosen, Ricardo Hartley Belmar, Pablo Sánchez-Núñez

While Open Science emphasises openness and reproducibility, governance documentation does not necessarily incorporate these features. It raises concerns, especially compared to government policy mandates emphasising transparency and accountability. Persistent identifiers (PIDs) play a crucial role in enabling the discoverability, accessibility, and traceability of scholarly outputs.

However, PIDs see widespread adoption among individual practitioners but slower adoption within institutional and regulatory bodies. This discrepancy leads to uneven metadata usage and highlights the need for a more unified approach to PIDs across the scholarly ecosystem. This essay analyses 46 Open Science governance documents to pinpoint essential areas for improvement.

The inconsistencies across documents, the absence of digital object identifiers (DOIs), and varied recognition ability by bibliographic managers underscore the urgent need for standardisation. Embracing Open Science offers a promising avenue to unify stakeholders in a collective push towards bolstering the integrity and efficiency of research, thereby ensuring more robust governance.

URL : Preprint. Open Science governance_ the role of persistent identifiers and metadata standards

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/9h564_v3

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Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

Authors : Mohammad Hosseini, Alex O. Holcombe, Marton Kovacs, Hub Zwart, Daniel S. Katz, Kristi Holmes

Group authorship (also known as corporate authorship, team authorship, consortium authorship) refers to attribution practices that use the name of a collective (be it team, group, project, corporation, or consortium) in the authorship byline. Data shows that group authorships are on the rise but thus far, in scholarly discussions about authorship, they have not gained much specific attention.

Group authorship can minimize tensions within the group about authorship order and the criteria used for inclusion/exclusion of individual authors. However, current use of group authorships has drawbacks, such as ethical challenges associated with the attribution of credit and responsibilities, legal challenges regarding how copyrights are handled, and technical challenges related to the lack of persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as ORCID, for groups.

We offer two recommendations: 1) Journals should develop and share context-specific and unambiguous guidelines for group authorship, for which they can use the four baseline requirements offered in this paper; 2) Using persistent identifiers for groups and consistent reporting of members’ contributions should be facilitated through devising PIDs for groups and linking these to the ORCIDs of their individual contributors and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the published item.

URL : Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2322557

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Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

Author : Martin Paul Eve

Introduction

Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved.

Methods

We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample.

Results

Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved.

The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source.

Discussion

Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers.

Conclusion

This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives.

However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

URL : Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

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Connecting Repositories to the Global Research Community: A Re-Curation Process

Author : Ted Habermann

Over the last decade, significant changes have affected the work that data repositories of all kinds do. First, the emergence of globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) has created new opportunities for repositories to engage with the global research community by connecting existing repository resources to the global research infrastructure. Second, repository use cases have evolved from data discovery to data discovery and reuse, significantly increasing metadata requirements.

To respond to these evolving requirements, we need retrospective and on-going curation, i.e. re-curation, processes that 1) find identifiers and add them to existing metadata to connect datasets to a wider range of communities, and 2) add elements that support reuse to globally connected metadata.

The goal of this work is to introduce the concept of re-curation with representative examples that are generally applicable to many repositories: 1) increasing completeness of affiliations and identifiers for organizations and funders in the Dryad Repository and 2) measuring and increasing FAIRness of DataCite metadata beyond required fields for institutional repositories.

These re-curation efforts are a critical part of reshaping existing metadata and repository processes so they can take advantage of new connections, engage with global research communities, and facilitate data reuse.

URL : Connecting Repositories to the Global Research Community: A Re-Curation Process

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.739

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ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

Authors : Kathrin Schnieders, Sandra Mierz, Sabine Boccalini, Wibke Meyer zu Westerhausen, Christian Hauschke, Stephanie Hagemann-Wilholt, Sonja Schulze

Reporting and presentation of research activities and outcome for research institutions in official, normative standards are more and more important and are the basis to comply with reporting duties. Institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) serve as important databases or data sources for external and internal reporting, which should ideally be connected with interfaces to the operational systems for automated loading routines to extract relevant research information.

This investigation evaluates whether (semi-) automated reporting using open, public research information collected via persistent identifiers (PIDs) for organizations (ROR), persons (ORCID), and research outputs (DOI) can reduce effort of reporting.

For this purpose, internally maintained lists of persons to whom an ORCID record could be assigned (internal ORCID person lists) of two different German research institutions—Osnabrück University (UOS) and the non-university research institution TIB—Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology Hannover—are used to investigate ORCID coverage in external open data sources like FREYA PID Graph (developed by DataCite), OpenAlex and ORCID itself. Additionally, for UOS a detailed analysis of discipline specific ORCID coverage is conducted. Substantial differences can be found for ORCID coverage between both institutions and for each institution regarding the various external data sources.

A more detailed analysis of ORCID distribution by discipline for UOS reveals disparities by research area—internally and in external data sources. Recommendations for future actions can be derived from our results: Although the current level of coverage of researcher IDs which could automatically be mapped is still not sufficient to use persistent identifier-based extraction for standard (automated) reporting, it can already be a valuable input for institutional CRIS.

URL : ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.1010504

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Persistent Identification for Conferences

Authors : Julian Franken, Aliaksandr Birukou, Kai Eckert, Wolfgang Fahl, Christian Hauschke, Christoph Lange

Persistent identification of entities plays a major role in the progress of digitization of many fields. In the scholarly publishing realm there are already persistent identifiers (PID) for papers (DOI), people (ORCID), organisation (GRID, ROR), books (ISBN) but there is no generally accepted PID system for scholarly events such as conferences or workshops yet.

This article describes the relevant use cases that motivate the introduction of persistent identifiers for conferences. The use cases were mainly derived from interviews, discussions with experts and their previous work. As primary stakeholders who are involved in the typical conference event life cycle researchers, conference organizers, and data consumers were identified.

The resulting list of use cases illustrates how PIDs for conference events will improve the current situation for these stakeholders and help with problems they are facing today.

URL : Persistent Identification for Conferences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011

Catégories
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

AuthorJia Liu

A digital object identifier (DOI) is an increasingly prominent persistent identifier in finding and accessing scholarly information. This paper intends to present an overview of global development and approaches in the field of DOI and DOI services with a slight geographical focus on Germany.

At first, the initiation and components of the DOI system and the structure of a DOI name are explored. Next, the fundamental and specific characteristics of DOIs are described and DOIs for three (3) kinds of typical intellectual entities in the scholar communication are dealt with; then, a general DOI service pyramid is sketched with brief descriptions of functions of institutions at different levels.

After that, approaches of the research data librarianship community in the field of RDM, especially DOI services, are elaborated. As examples, the DOI services provided in German research libraries as well as best practices of DOI services in a German library are introduced; and finally, the current practices and some issues dealing with DOIs are summarized. It is foreseeable that DOI, which is crucial to FAIR research data, will gain extensive recognition in the scientific world.

URL : Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1180