This section will describe what it means for a scholarly resource to be findable.
A persistent identifier (PID) is a long-lasting reference to a (digital or physical) resource:
PIDs have community support, organizational commitment and technical infrastructure to ensure persistence of identifiers. They often are created to respond to a community need. For instance, the International Standard Book Number or ISBN was created to assign unique numbers to books, is used by book publishers, and is managed by the International ISBN Agency. Another type of PID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID or ORCID (iD) was created to help with author disambiguation by providing unique identifiers for authors. The ODIN Project identifies additional PIDs along with Wikipedia’s page on PIDs.
The DOI is a common identifier used for academic, professional, and governmental information such as articles, datasets, reports, and other supplemental information. The International DOI Foundation (IDF) is the agency that oversees DOIs. CrossRef and Datacite are two prominent not-for-profit registries that provide services to create or mint DOIs. Both have membership models where their clients are able to mint DOIs distinguished by their prefix. For example, DataCite features a statistics page where you can see registrations by members.
A DOI has three main parts:
In the example above, the prefix is used by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) now called the Australia Research Data Commons (ARDC) and the suffix is a unique identifier for an object at Griffith University. DataCite provides DOI display guidance so that they are easy to recognize and use, for both humans and machines.
Exercise: Hydroshare
More and more services are using common schemas such as DataCite’s Metadata Schema or Dublin Core to foster greater use and discovery. A schema provides an overall structure for the metadata and describes core metadata properties. While DataCite’s Metadata Schema is more general, there are discipline specific schemas such as Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Darwin Core.
Thanks to schemas, the process of adding metadata has been standardized to some extent but there is still room for error. For instance, DataCite reports that links between papers and data are still very low. Publishers and authors are missing this opportunity.
Challenges: Automatic ORCID profile update when DOI is minted RelatedIdentifiers linking papers, data, software in Zenodo
DOIs are everywhere. Examples.
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Provenance refers to the data lineage (inputs, entitites, systems, etc.) that ultimately impact validation & credibility. A researcher should comply to good scientific practices and be sure about what should get a PID (and what not).
Metadata is central to visibility and citability – metadata behind a PID should be provided with consideration.
Policies behind a PID system ensure persistence in the WWW - point. At least metadata will be available for a long time.
Machine readability will be an essential part of future discoverability – resources should be checked and formats should be adjusted (as far possible).
Metrics (e.g. altmetrics) are supported by PID systems.
Some things to check:
The decision for or against a specific repository depends on various criteria, e.g.
Some recommendations: → look for the usage of PIDs → look for the usage of standards (DataCite, Dublin Core, discipline-specific metadata → look for licences offered → look for certifications (DSA / Core Trust Seal, DINI/nestor, WDS, …)
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Results from searching https://www.re3data.org: Out of more than 2115 repository systems listed in re3data.org in July 2018, only 809 (less than 39 %!) state to provide a PID service, with 524 of them using the DOI system.
Search open access repos: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/
FAIRSharing databases: https://fairsharing.org/databases/
Another method available to researchers to cite and give credit to research data is to author works in data journals or supplemental approaches used by publishers, societies, disciplines, and/or journals.
Articles in data journals allow authors to:
Examples:
Also, the following study discusses data journals in depth and reviews over 100 data journals: Candela, L. , Castelli, D. , Manghi, P. and Tani, A. (2015), Data Journals: A Survey. J Assn Inf Sci Tec, 66: 1747-1762. doi:10.1002/asi.23358
Does your discipline have a data journal? Or some other mechanism to share data? For example, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) via the publisher IOP Physics offers a supplement series as a way for astronomers to publish data.
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The content is this page was adapted from: https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-fair-research.