Institutional Identifiers in Practice: Christine Orr at CESSE 2015

Editor's Notes

• #9: And very often, the same person might play different roles – and therefore be found in multiple data sets. SLA example.
• #11: Also: there are plenty of institutions which share the same acronym, or are known by different official names – think different languages. This happens more often than you think…… So, you cannot disambiguate on name alone – you’d need a second data element, location…and that’s inefficient, and makes for poor data quality control & management.
• #12: You’ll note that I’ve used the term “Standard Identifiers” as opposed to just “Standards”… I’ll be focusing on using standard identifiers as the main data hooks that will allow us to aggregate information for the purpose of synthesizing knowledge. Interoperability implies communication; how we communicate something is very different than how we describe things. I should take a moment to clarify that the Ringgold ID is not a standard – not an ISO Certified standard, in any case, but in many cases, our data has become a defacto standard through application; some of you might be wondering what then constitutes a big “S” Standards – if any system uses a predefined taxonomy as an authority file to validate data (thereby achieving identify data entries for each and every instance it is needed) then a standard has been achieved. How data is exchanged is quite different than the data itself, and of course, standards may be applied to both. For my part, I’m going to talk about the data itself, not how it is exchanged– So, in terms of the data itself, what are we trying to standardize? Descriptions – the wrapper around highly unique content. More importantly, as an industry—as a species, really—we are creating data elements that can be interpreted by machines – I should say, easily interpreted by machines – I’ll come back to this topic near the end of my presentation.
• #13: Regardless of our business model, open access or traditional subscriptions, we need to make decisions upon a solid foundation, interoperate with all manner of systems, and facilitate sharing of data throughout the virtuous cycle of research, from researcher to reader. Tactical: customer service, APC calculation & application, helping different systems to interoperate & share data. Strategic: move away from “anecdata” make business decisions based on facts and trends. Analysis – how’s that OA journal doing? Develop new information: Create data overlays that may tell us new stories, and help us develop new services. Answer questions we’ve never been able to confidently state before: where have we got authors and no subscriptions? Overlay authors & reviewers to ensure there is no conflict of interest. Reveal new interdisciplinary collaborations.
• #16: More than 1.4M and counting,
• #18: International Standard Name Identifier: Scope = entities that may be found in library catalogs, ie, published works. Creators, publishers, subjects. Covers people (past, present, real, fictional, groups) and institutions such as publishers.
• #19: Of most interest in the OA discussion…..
• #21: ID applied to each record in a Ringgold Identify Database record; here is a sample.
• #22: What it is:
• #26: Funders currently active. This is a registry run by CrossRef, populated via data which is sourced from Elsevier.
• #28: Most publishers offer some level of discount or waiver based on affiliation: specific institutions, classes of institutions (per country or org type).
• #33: Authors don’t need to know their RIN, multiple orgs using the same standards & vocabulary. Prevent duplicate account / record creation Breaks down silos by enabling systems to be compared and linked Keep data up-to-date and systems synchronised Improve accuracy in reporting
• #35: 34
• #36: 35
• #38: Identifiers become more meaningful, more powerful, more effective, when they are used broadly and frequently.