Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications

Society for Scholarly Publishing2 June 2016Christine Orr

INSTITUTIONAL IDENTIFIERS: One piece of the new infrastructure

Who (or what) is Ringgold?• Ringgold is a small, for-profit, database

publisher• 2003: Identify Database & the Ringgold ID are

born out of a project to disambiguate the institutional subscribers to OUP journals• This was not a unique problem• Over the past decade, Ringgold has met the

requirements necessary to create a trusted PID to identify institutions.

• Sustainability - has to be there• Currency - must be maintained• Governance - rules matter• Extensible - ability to add new records

People

PlacesThings

Is the Ringgold ID a standard?Not an ISO standard….but: Interoperable with and mapped to standards & IDs (ISNI, IPEDs, etc.)Widely accepted: 24 of the top 25 academic publishers plus intermediaries, NGOs, and governments - more than 70 organizations in our space - have implemented the Ringgold ID.

• Copyright Clearance Center• ScholarOne Manuscripts• ORCID• Elsevier• Taylor & Francis• OUP• AAAS/Science• Wolters Kluwer• Royal Society of Chemistry• Kudos• IET

• NEJM/Massachusetts Medical Soc• Portuguese govt: Foundation for

Science and Technology• Aries Editorial Manager• ProQuest• PLoS• Am Chemical Society• Am Psychological Assn• SAO/NASA Astrophysical Data

System

Institutions Play Multiple Roles

Affiliations of Individuals:

• Authors• Editors• Reviewers• Past & present• Educational• Employment• Volunteer

Functions in Scholarly Comms:

• Licensee• Funder of research• Publisher• Payer of APC• Member institutions• Intermediaries• Operator of CRIS

systems

Identifying Institutions: How hard can it be?

• Hierarchies: Subsidiary components & complex relationships

…also• Who is responsible for the

entity’s record?• There are different types

which are crucial to understanding them

• There are more of them than first meets the eye?

420K institutions in scholarly communications

• Global, multi-sector coverage• Extensible: grows to meet the

needs of those who have adopted it• Built by hand• Governed & maintained

Identify: Three Key Features

MetadataHierarchiesRinggold ID

Univ Calif System

UCLA

Med School Coll of L&S

UCSD

Div of Physical Sci

UCLA: Univ Calif Los Angeles8783

UCLA: Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro

Alvarado33177

UCLA: Universidad Contemporanea de las

Americas376277

SizeTier

Subject Sector

+

MoreLocation

The Thing Inside the Thing

Ringgold’s Mission

To provide identifiers and structured data to power the

efficient exchange of information throughout the scholarly

research community

...and beyond.

Thank youChristine Orr

Sales Director, North America

Christine.Orr@ringgold.com

Tel: 540.359.6620

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1362-3330

www.ringgold.com

Clean Data. Confident Decisions.