Building persistent identifier systems for geoscience research – Technical solutions and community governance

Abstract:

The emergence of the Internet gave rise to the expectation that the internet would lead to greater accessibility, transparency and reproducibility of research results. New communication technologies enabled far easier and faster collaboration in larger, geographically more distributed networks. However, the distributed and disorganised nature of the internet not only allowed new technologies to emerge, it also made it difficult to maintain a persistent record of science.

Persistent identifiers were invented to allow unambiguous identification of resources on the net. At first, these resources referred to scholarly literature and related resources. The concept of using persistent identifiers has since been expanded to other, non-textual resources, like datasets and geological specimens, and more recently to authors and contributors of scholarly works, and to software and instruments.

Setting up identifier systems is technically trivial. The real challenge lies in creating a governance system for the respective identifiers. While Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) were originally invented by the publishing industry, they quickly became an established way for the identification of research resources. Other identifier systems, some of them using DOI as an example, were developed as grass-roots efforts by the scientific community.

Together with semantic technologies and linked data, unambiguous identification allows us to harness information at large scales beyond human comprehension. The technical possibilities offered by technology challenge some of the norms of scholarly cooperation, such as using and sharing resources beyond the emulation of paper-based publications.

This presentation will discuss the development of persistent identification of research resources as a community effort, using the technical and governance patterns developed for DOI and for IGSN for data as an example.