I spent last week in Washington, D.C., attending the Research Data Alliance and DataCite meetings, both held at the National Academy of Sciences. Both organizations are committed to making research data objects more widely available, discoverable, and citable, and the events were attended by broad international constituencies of researchers, librarians, funding organizations, publishers, repositories, universities, and policy makers. There was a lot of buzz about ORCID at these events. To truly support e-research, it’s essential to use persistent identifiers to connect data creators with their data, and that’s what the ORCID iD does!
The Research Data Alliance is an ambitious, global effort, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, European Commission, and the Australian Government to facilitate the interoperable sharing and exchange of data. RD-Alliance acts as a convening body to bring together organizations to facilitate research data standards. Currently they are hosting working groups on metadata standards, persistent identifiers, and data citation standards. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the U.S. National Science Foundation, opened the week of discussion and collaboration with his keynote talk by emphasizing that “Data-driven discovery is revolutionizing scientific discovery. This requires us to engage the whole world, and requires long term, bold, and comprehensive investment from partners across the globe.”
The spirit of collaboration continued with the the opening keynote for the DataCite meeting where CERN Director for Open Access Salvatore Mele emphasized the importance of listening to the research community, working collaboratively, and openly sharing our knowledge and resources. DataCite is an international consortium that supports the identification and sharing of research data objects through the assignment of DOIs to datasets. Several presenters shared information about ORCID at their institutions: Mele demonstrated how physics researchers can query the INSPIRE High Energy Physics information system by ORCID iD, Mark Hahnel demonstrated figshare’s recent ORCID integration, and Michael Witt of Purdue University stressed the value of linking ORCID identifiers to data DOIs. More and more, it is becoming possible for researchers to archive, discover, cite, and re-use datasets, as I first discussed in a blog post from earlier this year.
See ORCID’s contibution to the poster session at the RDA meeting and the Engaging Stakeholders panel at the DataCite meeting.