PIDapalooza 2019: Building a global PID community


Author: Ricarda Braukmann (DANS)

Picture of the PID Forum Button (I love PIDs) for the PIDapalooza19 blog postThis year’s destination of PIDapalooza, the relatively new but already famous persistent identifier festival, was Dublin and many partners from FREYA travelled to Ireland to present their work. For us, this year’s edition of PIDapalooza largely revolved around the launch of pidforum.org - a global discussion platform about PIDs. FREYA also reported on the PID Graph developments, PID user stories and our community engagement activities.

#PIDapalooza19 kicked off with the lighting of the eternal PID flame followed by a performance of Irish Uillean (“elbow”) pipe player, immediately creating the festival atmosphere that PIDapalooza is known for.

After the opening keynote by Gareth Murphy from the European Spallation Source (ESS) who explained the need for PIDs in their neutron science facility, FREYA welcomed participants to its parallel session on community engagement. Frances Madden (British Library) explained the ins and outs of our ambassador programme, and then gave the stage to Nicole Kearney (Biodiversity Heritage Library), the winner of our ambassador competition. In an excellent talk (including cute possum and cat pictures!) she presented her work on assigning DOIs for out-of-copyright materials, explaining that, in many cases, PIDs of out-of-copyright articles resolve to sites with a paywall whilst these contents should be made available Open Access.

The first day also saw the official launch of the PID Forum. Rachael Lammey, Ginny Hendricks (Crossref), Helena Cousijn (DataCite) and Maaike de Jong (DANS) introduced pidforum.org, a discussion platform aimed at bringing together a community of best practice around PIDs beyond the FREYA project. During the session, the audience gave lots of useful feedback, such as ideas for topics on the forum and communities to reach out to, that we will take into account in further developing the forum.

The highlight of the day was a circus-themed ORCID-Orama session, complete with a variety of costumes, bingo and quizzes, presenting the ORCID strategic themes and upcoming projects. After the final keynote of the day from Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh) on understanding the URI ecosystem, the PIDapaloozans gathered for informal get-together to socialize and test their knowledge on PIDs, anagrams and random facts during a pub quiz.

 

The second day of #PIDadpalooza19 started off with a plenary session from the “PID tribal elders”, including a talk by Adrian Burton (Australian Research Data Commons) who emphasized the importance of community engagement to promote uptake and best practices for data infrastructures, something we also hope to contribute to with pidforum.org and FREYA in general.

During the launch of ROR (Research Organisation Registry), the use of Organizational IDs was playfully demonstrated through a matching game where participants needed to find their organization-counterparts. The ROR registry is now up and running and more information is available on the ROR community website: https://ror.org/

In the afternoon, FREYA had the opportunity to join a session reporting back on the international PID Workshops that have been taken place in Singapore and London. For a full report on the London PID workshop see the FREYA website.

The final FREYA session focused on the PID Graph and the FREYA use cases for new PID types. Christine Ferguson (EMBL-EBI), Martin Fenner (DataCite) and Eliane Fankhauser (DANS) explained how FREYA has collected PID user stories during the past year, and how these will help with developing the PID Graph. The user stories have been added to the pidforum.org (see https://www.pidforum.org/c/user-stories) further comments and additions.

Before extinguishing the eternal PID flame and heading back home, Suze Kundu (Digital Science) gave a great summary of all the highlights of PIDapalooza, getting everyone excited for the next edition. We will be there next year!

 Picture of the PIDapalooza Audience for the PIDapalooza19 blog post

Want to know more?

The FREYA and other presentations are made available on Zenodo for anyone to revisit.