On Not Reinventing The Wheel

Information Industry News

Infrastructure and Identifiers

Infrastructure already exists to support funder goals. This was one of the pull quotes that appeared in a Crossref blog post, How Funding Agencies Can Meet OSTP Guidance Using Existing Open Infrastructure, published on November 17, 2022.  The post carries the byline of Ed Pentz, Executive Director of Crossref, summarizing its contents as a response to calls from the Crossref community. The post does the following:

• Provides an overview of the specific ways that Crossref (along with organisations and initiatives like DataCite, ORCID, and ROR) helps U.S. federal agencies—and indeed any other funder—meet critical aspects of the recommendations.
• Restates our intent to collaborate with all stakeholders in the scholarly research ecosystem, including the OSTP, the US federal agencies, our existing funder, publisher, and university members, to support the recommendation as plans develop.
• References the work and adoption of Crossref Grant DOIs, including analyses of existing metadata matching funding to outputs.
• Highlights that what’s outlined in the memo aligns with our longstanding mission to capture and maintain the scholarly record and our vision of the Research Nexus, as we describe in our current blog series, regarding our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR).

The upshot of Pentz’s message was that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy should take advantage of the thirty years of infrastructure work that the information community has already completed. There is no need for policy makers to spend time and money (resources already in short supply) to come up with yet another metadata element or persistent identifier to ensure compliance with government requirements. Calling for adoption of existing infrastructure would make the most sense. 

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO, had sent much the same message via a post to the Scholarly Kitchen just a day earlier. (Read We All Know What We Mean. Can We Just Put It In The Policy? ) Parsing the post’s actual URL reveals a slightly blunt version of his message – policies on identifiers are too vague and should be specific as does the post’s inclusion of a well-known XKCD cartoon. Standards are useful things. Two paragraphs recounting NISO’s prior experience in this type of work are key here:

Back in the early 2000s, Ringgold was formed as a service to unambiguously identify institutional subscribers to scholarly content. The Ringgold ID and their institutional taxonomy was widely used by publishers in order to clean and maintain their subscriber lists. In 2012, when ISO published the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), the potential for using this system for institutions was already clear and within scope of the system. Although ISNI had originally been envisioned as an identifier for creators of content, primarily for the use-case of tracking royalties, it became clear that “creator” could encompass any range of parties, including people, pseudonyms, groups of people (bands), or even corporations. The NISO Institutional Identification (I2) recommendation was published in 2013 and, noting the publication of ISNI, recommended its use for this purpose. In 2013, Ringgold was among the first registration agencies for the ISNI system and most of the institutions assigned Ringgold IDs now also have ISNIs, the two are not the same. Meanwhile, Digital Science developed and provided the community a public domain release of its institutional service, GRID. Building upon this, members of the PID community led by California Digital Library, CrossRef, and DataCite came together to launch the Research Organization Registry (ROR), which was initially seeded with the public domain data from GRID. While GRID is no longer publicly available, it has forked from ROR and remains in use within Digital Science systems, and other systems as well. Ideally its use will continue to be deprecated. Some argue that the openness and community governance of ROR justifies the investment in creating and managing the system, which indeed it might. 

A number of tools and services now exist to connect this network graph of identifiers and outputs, so that the interconnected world of science can be navigated…Ideally, settling on a single approach would reduce overall costs and improve interoperability in the ecosystem.

In the United States, we’re about to embark on what will be an exhausting and stormy period; we have a divided Congress with two rambunctious parties with different political agendas vying to retake the Presidency. It’s never clear the level of attention that aides on the Hill and at the White House pay to organizations such as Crossref and NISO but, in this instance, one hopes that someone in those policy roles is monitoring Twitter, Mastodon and other public comment platforms. Two executive directors from two international membership organizations are saying the same thing. No one needs to reinvent the wheel. We simply need policy makers to be attentive to the existing practical and proven elements that the global research information environment has spent decades to develop. Spread the word -- as NISO member Scholarly IQ has done with a brief note in their most recent newsletter.