On 22 January, ORCID co-hosted an Organization ID Stakeholders meeting with DataCite and Crossref. The meeting marked a transition from the work of the Organization ID Working Group to a formal launch of an Organization ID Registry Initiative. Attendees included respondents to the Organization ID Registry RFI, members of the Working Group, and other stakeholders, with the stated goal of establishing a governance structure for the initiative.
The meeting opened with a discussion of the findings and recommendations of the working group. With regard to governance, a major recommendation was to host the initiative inside an existing non-profit 
organization, to reduce start up costs and time to launch. On the product side, the group recommended that the initiative focus on the researcher attribution use case, to seed the registry with data from existing open data sources, and to ensure that organizations have opportunity to review and update their own listing.
We moved into a presentation on the responses to the RFI, which solicited statements of interest from the research community in serving in a governance role, and/or providing data, hosting, and/or resources to launch the initiative. The RFI received 22 responses, from members of the Working Group and a number of organizations who maintain organization data models and/or databases. In general, there was broad interest in participating in the creation of an open registry — in each of the components of standing up a service: governance, providing data, hosting, or providing staffing or administrative resources. We also received policy, data structure, and business model suggestions. This strong response bodes well for gathering the expertise, resources, and enthusiasm for standing up an open registry that will be used by the research community.
From this solid foundation, the attendees opened a discussion on governance. We reviewed options for establishing collaboration of partners to host the registry – using the SCOAP3 framework as a starting point (see the event page for the straw man proposal). The group discussed what would qualify an organization to be a founding partner, as well as the structure of a governing body. Ultimately, there was consensus around creating an interim governing council, consisting of the Working Group members, meeting attendees, and the meeting participants, all of whom are actively engaged in getting the initiative off the ground.
Following this discussion, five organizations presented their vision for hosting the registry. These included the British Library/ISNI, California Digital Library, Crossref, OCLC, and the IP Registry. HBZ also expressed interest in hosting, but were unable to attend in-person. All presentations are available on the event page. Hosting proposals ranged from project administration, to leveraging existing registry infrastructure, to using seed data to construct a new registry.
Workshop attendees – nominally the interim governing council- then grappled with how to decide on a host. After acknowledging conflict of interest, they charged ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref – as the Steering Committee and now interim executive committee – to draft a formal proposal to launch the initiative. The proposal is to define:
- “Partners” – who will participate in governing board
- Qualifications of “host(s)” – who will provide start-up administration, staffing, and/or technical resources
- Governance structure – to include governing board, executive committee, and community forum
- The entity legally responsible for the collaborative
- An MOU that specifies how decisions are made
The interim executive committee is committed to crafting a proposal and sharing with the interim governing council by the end of February. During this process, they will be engaging with all of the organizations that expressed an interest in hosting, with the goal of creating an inclusive collaborative framework.
Stay tuned! And, as usual, contact us if you have questions or comments.
