Repository Interoperable Identification Infrastructure

Draft Action Plan for International Coordination

Document information

Version: 0.3

Scope

This action plan describes work to enable/assist us to do a better job of identifying entities within our repositories as well as making connections across repositories. For the purposes of this action plan, these entities are limited to: Author, Institution, Repository and Object entity (eg research paper, dataset or collection).  We know that we will have researchers contributing to an increasingly complex and diverse mesh of stores (including institutionally-supported, discipline-mandated, and publisher-hosted). We also know that we need to work on the underpinnings that will enable us to stitch these together (possibly via something like OAI-ORE or FRBR) and support a range of useful services. Note that the purpose of the workshop is not to debate competing information models, but to focus on what concrete steps we can take to improve the identification of entities in a coordinated way. However, we need to be aware that some of the interoperability challenges will come down to divergent information models. 

NOTE: This action plan does not make any explicit recommendations about the particular identifiers to be used in each instance; this will need to be the subject of work under this action plan. 

Benefit

International coordination to set up an effective interoperable identification infrastructure for repositories (and other web entities) will enable:

-         researchers to navigate and interact with other people and systems, with a level of reliability that enables those interactions to be richer than possible now

-         publishers to have an infrastructure that includes the DOI-based systems currently used, but that also covers other entities related to the papers and datasets they publish

-         research managers or funders to have a reliable set of assertions about the relationships between papers, authors and projects; that is, those assertions are explicit and can be machine processed[1]

-         service providers and repository managers to be able to build much richer services for their users. 

Background

See Alma’s briefing materials, in particular these:

·        https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/display/digitalrepositories/Author+identification

·        https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/display/digitalrepositories/Institution+identifiers

·        https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/display/digitalrepositories/Persistent+identifiers