Tag Archives: Australia

PIDs in Australia

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This post is by Matthias Liffers. He is the Product Manager for the Persistent Identifier Services at the Australian Research Data Common

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are a core component of a national information infrastructure and key to world-class research and innovation. In 2024, the Australian Research Data Commons released the 2024 Australian National PID Strategy – developed through a coordinated, comprehensive and collaborative process and informed by international developments and the international PID environment.

But what is a PID? It is a globally unique, unambiguous, long-lasting reference to a particular person or thing in the research ecosystem. A typical PID consists of two parts: the identifier itself, which is a unique string of characters and/or numbers; and an accompanying public metadata record.

For ease of use, most PIDs can be displayed as a URL that you can visit in your browser in order to access the metadata record. For example, the PID that refers to me (Matthias Liffers, the author of this post) is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3639-2080. If you visit that URL, you can see a human-readable representation of the metadata record known as a landing page.

I have only one ORCID, and that ORCID will always refer to me. If another person called Matthias Liffers creates an ORCID, they will get their own. Admittedly, my name isn’t very common, but it makes more sense if you think all the researchers that are called Kim Lee or John Smith.

There are many PIDs, each suited to identifying a particular type of thing. An ORCID iD, for example, is designed for researchers and other contributors to research, whereas a DOI is more appropriate for a research output like a publication, a dataset, or a piece of research software. There are also PIDs for organisations (ROR ID) and projects (RAiD).

Why are there so many different types of PID? Because the metadata required for a human is quite different to the metadata you would need for a publication. The metadata schema for each type of PID is tailored to the type of thing you want to identify.

Generally, the person or organisation responsible for a particular thing will mint – create and assign – a PID to it. For example, a researcher would create their own ORCID and keep it through their whole career, whereas a publisher would mint DOIs for the articles in their journals. Items deposited into trustworthy repositories like Dryad, Figshare, and Zenodoreceive DOIs. If you work at a research institution, you might have access to an institutional repository that can also assign DOIs.

You might have noticed that my ORCID record contains references to my current and past employers, my education, and my publications. This demonstrates where the real power of PIDs lies – being able to make links between PIDs, so that you can establish unambiguous relationships between authors and their papers, their dataset, their affiliations, their projects, and their funding.

This global network of relationships is known as the research graph and, as more researchers and research organisations apply PIDs to their contributions to research, it gets easier to find research, establish its trustworthiness, and measure its impact on society.

To learn more about the use of PIDs in Australia, visit the Australian National PID Strategy and Roadmap website. On top of the PID Strategy, the ARDC is leading the development of RAiD – the Research Activity Identifier, as the global Registration Authority for ISO 23527:2022.

Australia isn’t the only country working on a National PID Strategy. A couple of weeks after the publication of this blog post, PIDfest 2024 will be taking place at the National Technical Library of the Czech Republic in Prague from 11-13 June 2024. It is an opportunity for PID providers like ORCID, DataCite, Crossref and the Australian Research Data Commons to come together, share knowledge, and work on pain points to make sure that when someone turns on the tap for research information, it flows.

 

Research Support Community Day, Australia

Author: Jayshree Mamtora, Manager, Scholarly Communications, James Cook University, Australia

In Australia, Research Support Community Day (RSC Day) has become the premier professional development event for research librarians, and open to anyone working or interested in research support and related services. It started “small” with the very first event held in person at Griffith University in Brisbane in 2013 with just 100 participants. This year close to 300 participants attended the 11th Research Support Community Day/s held online from 27–29 June 2023.

RSC Day started as a free, annual event and has remained a free, annual event. Due to circumstances and world events the event has been run online since 2021, and over a period of three days. It is held in three-hour blocks each day to enable as many colleagues as possible in different time zones in our region wherever they may be – Australia, New Zealand or further afield – to be able to easily participate.

Each of the three days is headlined by a keynote speaker followed by a series of speakers who can select a 15–20-minute slot depending on their chosen topic or opt for a five-minute lightning talk giving as many different speakers as possible to present on a variety of different research-related subject areas.

We have been fortunate to have had the support of Dr. Cathy Foley, Australia’s Chief Scientist who has presented a keynote at two of our recent events and who has announced open access to research outputs as one of her four strategic priorities. Other keynote presenters have come from a variety of research backgrounds including senior research academics, research administrators and representatives from research funding bodies.

As founding member and Chair of the Research Support Community Day organising committee, I invite you to check out the recordings of the online presentations from our YouTube Channel. You can view the details of all 11 events from our website: rscday.info.

We are very grateful to Sage APAC for their continued support and sponsorship of our event, as well. as the many institutions that provide staff or in-kind support to ensure its continued success.

[email protected]

 

State Library of NSW and Wikipedia unite in Australia’s first GLAM residency

Wikipedia is set to experience a dramatic increase in Australian content with the State Library of NSW becoming the first Australian cultural institution to engage a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) Wikipedian-in-residence.

According to Alex Byrne, NSW State Librarian & Chief Executive: “There’s limited Australian content on Wikipedia compared to USA and Europe, and we want to provide more. The Wikipedian-in-residence will enable local knowledge to be more easily accessible on one of the world’s most popular websites.”

Over a 14-week residency Wikipedian Gillian White will equip 20 library staff with the skills to create and contribute authoritative content to Wikipedia on the significant people, places and events in NSW and Australia.

“Librarians are a natural fit with Wiki as they are trained professionals with a passion for sharing knowledge, and appreciate the importance of referencing credible sources within their online contributions – it’s not commonly known that Wikipedia articles and edits must be accurately referenced,” says Ms White.

The newly trained library staff will be using the State Library’s extensive collections on Australia and its region to contribute valuable content to Wikipedia articles on the Blue Mountains, the convict era, WWI servicemen, Indigenous sacred sites, and many others.

“The State Library is committed to making content from our significant collections more accessible, more discoverable and re-usable, and the GLAM Wikipedian-in-residence project is an important step to the Library becoming a key global resource,” says Alex Byrne, NSW State Librarian & Chief Executive.

Source:  SLNSW Media Centre