Report on the Digital Author Identifiers summit

Summary

On 13 and 14 March Knowledge Exchange organised a summit on digital author identifiers. It was well attended by a broad group of international experts, with 31 participants from 10 countries. The first day was directed at identifying the issues and the second day at using the findings and opinions to feed into the development of international initiatives being developed (notably ISNI and ORCID). There are already national identifier systems in place in several countries and there was a strong interest at the summit in connecting these internationally.

The summit clearly showed that there is value in aligning and connecting current systems. There are already discussions underway between ORCID and ISNI and VIAF feeds directly into ISNI. These systems are engaging with different groups (ORCID with publishers/researchers, ISNI/VIAF with national libraries) and have different business models but it seems possible that a co-ordinated approach would be feasible. This would definitely be to the benefit of researchers, as well as those working on information infrastructure and research administration.

Key recommendations were:
– All parties should work towards preventing redundancy. It would be great to have one canonical ID bringing together existing systems.
– There is an interest in an open thin layer with clear interfaces so others can build services on this.
– At present there are broadly two approaches to collecting researcher IDs. Solution providers should draw on the relevant strengths of both of these approaches.
– Now is the time for institutions to start doing their homework. They should not make blocking choices but progress and start assigning identifiers and work on linking these with VIAF