Persistent person identifiers for long time research data

Tue Nov 24 2020

In a significantly networked and highly collaborative scientific field such as plant research, the goal is to jointly use and federate services for data management. With the goal of a well acknowledged data publication in mind a persistent link between research objects like published Annotated Research Contexts (ARC) and persons need to be established and maintained. Of central importance for this objective are persistent identifiers of researchers. Because of the high turnover within this group of individuals, agreement among all stakeholders in the science enterprise on a uniform, internationally recognized, and institution-wide system would be a considerable relief, since switching between institutions would no longer require changes in the database. Such an internationally recognized identifier should be stable and unique for individuals. In the course of the work of the Baden-Württemberg-based Science Data Center BioDATEN, which has personnel overlaps with DataPLANT, initial discussions were held in this direction.

In a first step, BioDATEN has joined the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of DINI and made a recommendation for ORCID. In this course it is recommended to identify persons in research information systems, repositories and research data management via the ORCID ID and repositories via re3data. These considerations are also pending for DataPLANT and are to be discussed in the context of standardization (TA 1) or in the Scientific Board. The ORCID ID already has a high degree of diffusion and acceptance in the community. It does not have to remain the exclusive identifier.