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Report on Knowledge Exchange International Author
ID Works
The Knowledge Exchange (a collaboration of DEFF in Denmark, DFG
in Germany, JISC in the UK and SURF in the Netherlands) hosted a very
helpful workshop on international author ID management on March 13-14,
2012 in London which I was fortunate to be able to participate in. The
announcement of the report and a summary of the outcomes is reproduced
below. The direct link to the workshop report is
http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Admin/Public/DWSDownload.aspx?File=%2fFiles%2fFiler%2fdownloads%2fDAI+summit%2fReport+KE+DAI+summit.pdf
This workshop was an enormously useful complement to the
CNI Workshop on Scholarly Identity which was held on April 4, and
several particpants attended both workshops. A report from the CNI
Workshop should be available in a few weeks, and of course I'll
announce it here.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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Summit shows that connecting
international digital author identifier systems would be to the
benefit of researchers, as well as those working on information
infrastructure and research administration.
On 13 and 14 March Knowledge
Exchange organised a well attended and timely summit on digital author
identifiers. The summit clearly showed that there is value in aligning
and connecting current systems. The developing initiatives ORCID and
ISNI are already involved in conversations and the Virtual
International Authority File (VIAF) feeds directly into ISNI. These
systems are engaging with different groups (ORCID with
publishers/researchers, ISNI/VIAF with national libraries) and have
different business models. However a co-ordinated approach would be
feasible. This would definitely be to the benefit of researchers, as
well as those working on information infrastructure and research
administration.
Key recommendations from the
summit were:
All parties should work
towards preventing redundancy. It would be great to have one canonical
ID bringing together existing systems.
There is an interest in an
open thin layer with clear interfaces so others can build services on
this.
At present there are
broadly two approaches to collecting researcher IDs. Solution
providers should draw on the relevant strengths of both of these
approaches.
Now is the time for
institutions to start doing their homework. They should not make
blocking choices but progress and start assigning identifiers and work
on linking these with VIAF.
The summit was well attended by a
broad group of international experts, with 31 participants from 10
countries. The first day was directed at identifying the issues and
the second day at using the findings and opinions to feed into the
development of international initiatives being developed. There are
already national identifier systems in place in several countries and
there was a strong interest at the summit in connecting these
internationally.
On behalf of the Knowledge
Exchange partners,
Kind regards,
Anne Maja Wad
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