Registering Researchers in Authority Files

Written by OCLC Research Program Officer Karen Smith-Yoshimura and a 13-member task group comprised of specialists from the US, UK and the Netherlands, this report summarizes their research into approaches to providing authoritative researcher identifiers.

Registering researchers in some type of authority file or identifier system has become more compelling as both institutions and researchers recognize the need to compile their scholarly output. The report presents functional requirements and recommendations for six stakeholders: researchers, funders, university administrators, librarians, identity management systems and aggregators (including publishers). It also provides an overview of the researcher identifier landscape, changes in the field, emerging trends, and opportunities.

Key highlights:

– While funders and publishers have been adopting researcher identifiers, it is equally important for research institutions and libraries to recognize that `authors are not strings` and that persistent identifiers are needed to link authors their scholarly output.

– Although there are overlaps among identifier systems, no one system will ever include all researchers or meet all functional requirements, so the ability to communicate among systems becomes crucial.

– New modes of scholarly communication increase the need to rely on persistent researcher identifiers to attribute output to the correct researcher and the researcher’s institution.

– Funders are finding persistent identifiers are important to for efficient and scalable tracking of the impact of the research they support.

– Although interoperability between systems is increasing, approaches used in different identifier systems for formats and data elements are often not interoperable.

– There is a huge opportunity for third-party reconciliation or resolution services to provide linking among different identifier systems.

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