FREYA @ FORCE2018: making PIDs work for you

FORCE11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that helps facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Their annual meetings (this year: FORCE2018) aim to bring different stakeholders to the table for an open discussion about changing the ways scholarly and scientific information is communicated, shared and used.

In FREYA, we try to contribute to improved information sharing in the scholarly community through the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs), and specifically, by connecting different PID systems. FORCE11 was an excellent opportunity to ask the community how we could help them with their PID use cases.

An important topic was of course data citation. In terms of linking PIDs this is a simple use case (linking an article DOI to a dataset identifier), but nevertheless very important. From the side of organizations there was also a lot of interest in an extra step, namely linking organizations via the researcher to different research outputs. This will help organizations get a better overview of all the research that’s done at the institution. These use cases align well with the FREYA work on the PID Graph, which will enable these kinds of more complex connections between PIDs.

Sustainability of Open Science infrastructures was another important topic at FORCE11 and also highly relevant for PIDs and FREYA. Several presentations covered the topics of collaboration between various Open Science initiatives and Open Source software for scholarly communication.

We were also looking to get feedback on how we can make the PID Forum, the FREYA platform for engagement, most useful for researchers and organizations. One option that was discussed is to create a kind of ‘marketplace’ where organizations can go to find the best PID for their use case. With the increasing importance of PIDs, there is often awareness that these are good to use, but it’s not always clear who should be using what and when.

We will continue to explore these ideas within FREYA and are always happy to hear from you if you have ideas or suggestions!

FREYA PID Forum poster that was presented during the FORCE2018 conference.