PIDapalooza on Crossref

Calling all 24-hour (PID) party people!

Kathleen Luschek — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While we wish we could be together in person to celebrate the fifth PIDapalooza, there’s an upside to moving it online: now everyone can participate in the universe’s best PID party! With 24 hours of non-stop PID programming, you’ll be able to come to the party no matter where you happen to be.

Send us your ideas for #PIDapalooza21

Now is your chance to share your work in the #PIDapalooza21 spotlight! We’re seeking proposals for short, interactive sessions about what you are doing––or want to do––with persistent identifiers and the communities that love and use them.

#PIDapalooza21 will feature sessions around the broad theme of PIDs and Open Research Infrastructure, focusing on the following areas:

Theme 1. PIDs 101

For PID beginners! You’ve got just 30 minutes to get attendees up to speed on a PID or PIDs. Make it fast! Make it fact-filled! Make it fun!

Theme 2. PID Communities International

Have you always wanted to host a Spanish-language PID session, or bring together PID people in the humanities? Tell us how you’d connect with PID peers around the world!

Theme 3. PID Success Stories

There’s nothing better than hearing about what’s working in the PID world––and why! Share your success stories so we can all benefit from them.

Theme 4. PID Party!

It wouldn’t be PIDapalooza without the party sessions, so be creative! Help us make this the best PID party ever!

Propose a session now!

The call for proposals will be open until October 30. Submit your PIDea now!

*Note: The PIDapalooza submission form uses Google. If you are unable to access Google Forms, email your session idea.

Get the full low-down on #PIDapalooza21 at the PIDapalooza website.

We'll be rocking your world again at PIDapalooza 2020

Ginny Hendricks — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!

We have a shiny [new website](https://pidapalooza.org), with loads more information than before, including spotify playlists (please add your PID songs to [the 2020 one](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1oJtbpTzF9I3MewQ1Yasml?si=D0TKdR8BTJSL-GA3X_LwVQ)!), an instagram photo gallery, and of course registration information. Look out for updates there and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/pidapalooza).

And, led by Helena, the Program Committee is starting its search for sessions that meet PIDapalooza’s goals of being PID-focused, fun, informative, and interactive. If you’ve a PID story to share, a PID practice to recommend, or a PID technology to launch, the Committee wants to hear from you. Please send them your ideas, using this form, by September 27. We aim to finalize the program by late October/early November.

Don’t forget to tie your proposal into one of the six festival themes:

Theme 1: Putting Principles into Practice

FAIR, Plan S, the 4 Cs; principles are everywhere. Do you have examples of how PIDs helped you put principles into practice? We’d love to hear your story!

Theme 2: PID Communities

We believe PIDs don’t work without community around them. We would like to hear from you about best practice among PID communities so we can learn from each other and spread the word even further!

Theme 3: PID Success Stories

We already know PIDs are great, but which strategies worked? Share your victories! Which strategies failed? Let’s turn these into success stories together!

Theme 4: Achieving Persistence through Sustainability

Persistence is a key part of PIDs, but there can’t be persistence without sustainability. Do you want to share how you sustain your PIDs or how PIDs help you with sustainability?

What would make heterogeneous PID systems ‘interoperate’ optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? And what about the social aspects? How do we bridge the gaps between different stakeholder groups and communities?

Theme 6: PID Party!

You don’t just learn about PIDs through powerpoints. What about games? Interpretive dance? Get creative and let us know what kind of activity you’d like to organize at PIDapalooza this year!

PIDapalooza: the essentials

What? PIDapalooza 2020 - the open festival of persistent identifiers
When? 29-30 January 2020 (kickoff party the evening of January 28)
Where? Belem Cultural Center, Lisbon, Portugal (map)
Why? To think, talk, live persistent identifiers for two whole days with your fellow PID people, experts, and newcomers alike!

We hope you’re as excited about PIDapalooza 2020 as we are and we look forward to seeing you in Lisbon.

What's that DOI?

Joe Wass — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a long overdue followup to 2016’s “URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship”. Like that post, this accompanies my talk at PIDapalooza, the festival of open persistent identifiers). I don’t think I need to give a spoiler warning when I tell you that it’s still complicated. But this post presents some vocabulary to describe exactly how complicated it is. Event Data has been up and running and collecting data for a couple of years now, but this post describes changes we made toward the end of 2018.

If Event Data is new to you, you can read about its development in other blog posts and the User Guide. Today I’ll be describing a specific but important part of the machinery: how we match landing pages to DOIs.

Some background

Our Event Data service provides you with a live database of links to DOIs, found from across the web and social media. Data comes from a variety of places, and most of it is produced by Agents operated by Crossref. We have Agents monitoring Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, blogs and more besides. It is a sad truth that the good news of DOIs has not reached all corners of world, let alone the dustiest vertices of the world wide web. And even within scholarly publishing and academia, not everyone has heard of DOIs and other persistent identifiers.

Of course, this means that when we look for links to content-that-has-DOIs, what we at Crossref call ‘registered content’, we can’t content ourselves with only looking for DOIs. We also have to look for article landing pages. These are the pages you arrive at when you click on a DOI, the page you’re on when you decide to share an article.

Half full or half empty?

So we’re trying to track down links to these landing pages, rather than just DOIs. You could look at this two ways.

The glass-half-empty view would be that it’s a real shame people don’t use DOIs. Don’t they know that their links aren’t future-proof? Don’t they know that DOIs allow you to punch the identifier into other services?

The glass-half-full view is that it’s really exciting that people outside the traditional open identifier crowd are interacting with the literature. We’ve been set a challenge to try and track this usage. By collecting this data and processing it into a form that’s compatible with other services we can add to its value and better help join the dots in and around the community that we serve. Not everyone tweeting about articles counts as ‘scholarly Twitter’, and hopefully we can bridge some divides (the subject of my talk at PIDapalooza last year, 'Bridging Identifiers').

How do we do it?

One of the central tenets of Event Data is transparency. We record as much information as we can about the data we ingest, how we process it, and what we find. Of course, you don’t have to use this data, it’s up to you how much depth you want to go into. But it’s there if you want it.

The resulting data set in Event Data is easy to use, but allows you to peek beneath the surface. We do this by linking every Event that our Agents collect through to an Evidence Record. This in turn links to Artifacts, which describe our working data set.

One such Artifact is the humbly named domain-decision-structure. This is a big tree that records DOI prefixes, domain names, and how they’re connected. It includes information such as “some DOIs with the prefix 10.31139 redirect to the domain polishorthopaedics.pl, and we can confirm that pages on that domain correctly represent their DOI”. We produce this list by visiting a sample of DOIs from every known prefix. We then ask the following questions:

Which webpage does this DOI redirect to, and what domain name does it have?
Does the webpage include its correct DOI in the HTML metadata?

From this we build the Artifact that records prefix → domain relationships, along with a flag to say whether or not the domain correctly represents its DOI in at least one case. You can put this data to a number of uses, but we use it to help inform our URL to DOI matching.

What Agents do

The Agents use the domain list to search for links. For example, the Reddit Agent uses it to query for new discussions about websites on each domain. They then pass this data to the Percolator, which is the machinery that produces Events.

The Percolator takes each input, whether it’s a blog post or a Tweet, and extracts links. If it finds a DOI link, that’s low hanging fruit. It then looks for links to URLs on one of the domains in the list. All of these are considered to be candidate landing page URLs. Once it has found a set of candidate links in the webpage it then has to find which ones correspond to DOIs, and validate that correspondence.

For each candidate URL it follows the link and retrieves the webpage. It looks in the HTML metadata, specifically in the <meta name='dc.identifier' content='10.5555/12345678' >, to see if the article indicates its DOI. It also looks in the webpage to see if it reports its DOI in the body text.

Not so fast

But can you trust the web page to indicate its own DOI? What about sites that say that they have a DOI belonging to another member? What about those pages that have invalid or incorrect DOIs? These situations can, and do, occur.

We have the following methods at our disposal, in order of preference.

doi-literal - This is the most reliable, and it indicates that the URL we found in the webpage was a DOI not a landing page. We didn’t even have to visit the article page.
pii - The input was a PII (Publisher Item Identifier). We used our own metadata to map this into a DOI.
landing-page-url - We thought that the URL was the landing page for an article. Some webpages actually contain the DOI embedded in URL. So we don’t even have to visit the page.
landing-page-meta-tag - We had to visit the article landing page. We found a meta tag, eg. dc.identifier, indicating the DOI.
landing-page-page-text - We visited the webpage but there was no meta tag. We did find a DOI in the body text and we think this is the DOI for this page. This is the least reliable.

On top of this, we have a number of steps of validation. Again, these are listed in order of preference.

literal - We found a DOI literal, so we didn’t have to do any extra work. This is the most reliable.
lookup - We looked up the PII in our own metadata, and we trust that.
checked-url-exact - We visited the landing page and found a DOI. We visited that DOI and confirmed that it does indeed lead back to this landing page. We are therefore confident that this is the correct DOI for the landing page URL.
checked-url-basic - We visited the DOI and it led back to almost the same URL. The protocol (http vs https), query parameters or upper / lower case may be different. This can happen if tracking parameters are automatically added by the website meaning the URLs are no longer identical. We are still quite confident in the match.
confirmed-domain-prefix - We were unable to check the link between the DOI and the landing page URL, so we had to fall back to previously observed data. On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. “10.5555”) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. “www.example.com”) and those websites correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. Only the domain and DOI prefix are considered. We therefore believe that the domain reliably reports its own DOIs correctly in at least some cases.
recognised-domain-prefix - On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. “10.5555”) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. “www.example.com”). Those websites do not always correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. This is slightly less reliable.
recognised-domain - On previous occasions we have seen that this domain is associated with DOIs in general. This is the least reliable.

We record the method we used to find the DOI, and the way we verified it, right in the Event. Look in the obj.method and obj.verification fields.

Of course, there’s a flowchart.

You can take a closer look in the User Guide.

If you think that’s a bit long-winded, well, you’re right. But it does enable us to capture DOI links without giving a false sense of security.

So, what happens?

If you ask the Event Data Query API for the top ten domains that we matched to DOIs in the first 20 days of January 2019, it would tell you:

Domain	Number of Events captured
`doi.org`	2058433
`dx.doi.org`	242707
`www.nature.com`	170808
`adsabs.harvard.edu`	163387
`www.sciencedirect.com`	96849
`onlinelibrary.wiley.com`	88760
`link.springer.com`	63869
`www.tandfonline.com`	41911
`www.sciencemag.org`	39489
`academic.oup.com`	39267

Here we see a healthy showing for actual DOIs (which you can explain by Wikipedia’s excellent use of DOIs) followed by some of the larger publishers. This demonstrates that we’re capturing a healthy number of Events from Wikipedia pages, tweets, blog posts etc that reference landing pages.

Awkward questions

This is not a perfect process. The whole point of PIDs is to unambiguously identify content. When users don’t use PIDs, there will inevitably be imperfections. But because we collect and make available all the processing along the way, hopefully we can go back to the old data, or allow any researchers to try and squeeze more information out of the data.

Q: Why bother with all of this? Can’t you just use the URLs?

We care about persistent identifiers. They are stable identifiers, which means they don’t change over time. The same DOI will always refer to the same content. In contrast, publishers’ landing pages can and do change their URLs over time. If we didn’t use the DOIs then our data would suffer from link-rot.

DOIs are also compatible across different services. You can use the DOI for an article to look it up in metadata and citation databases, and to make connections with other services.

This is not the only solution to the problem. Other services out there, such as Cobalt Metrics, do record the URLs and store an overlaid data set of identifier mappings. At Crossref we have a specific focus on our members and their content, and we all subscribe to the value of persistent identifiers for their content.

Of course, we don’t throw anything away. The URLs are still included in the Events. Look in the obj.url field.

Q: If DOIs are so amazing why keep URLs?

Event Data is useful to a really wide range of users. Some will need DOIs to work with the data. But others, who may want to research the stuff under the hood, such as the behaviour of social media users, or the processes we employ, may want to know more detail. So we include it all.

Q: Can’t you just decide for me?

In a way, we do. If an Event is included in our data set, we are reasonably confident that it belongs there. All we are doing is providing you with more information.

Q: Why only DOIs?

We specialise in DOIs and believe they are the right solution for unambiguously and persistently identifying content. Furthermore the content registered with Crossref has been done so for the specific benefits that DOIs bring.

Q: What about websites that require cookies and/or JavaScript to execute?

Some sites don’t work unless you allow your browser to accept cookies. Some sites don’t render any content unless you allow their JavaScript to execute. Large crawlers, like Google, emulate web browsers when they scrape content, but it’s resource-intensive and not everyone has the resources of Google!

This is an issue we’ve known about for a while. My talk two years ago was about precisely this topic. We know it’s a hurdle we’ll have to overcome at some point. We do have plans to look into it, but we haven’t found a sufficiently cost-effective and reliable way to do it yet.

Any sites that do do this will be inherently less reliable, so we recommend everyone to put their Dublin Core Identifiers in the HTML, render your HTML server-side (which is the default way of doing things) and don’t require cookies.

Q: What’s the success rate?

This is an interesting question. The results aren’t black and white. At the low end of the confidence spectrum we do have a cut-off point, at which we don’t generate an Event. But when we do create one we qualify it by describing the method we used to match and verify the connection. What level of confidence you want to trust is for you to decide. We just describe the steps we took to verify it.

It’s tricky quantifying false negatives. We have plenty of unmatched links, but not every unmatched link even could be matched to a DOI, for example there are some domains that have some DOI-registered content mixed with non-registered content.

We therefore err on the side of optimism, and let users choose what level of verification they require.

So talking of false positives or false negatives is a complicated question. We’ve not done any analytical work on this yet, but would welcome any input from the community.

Q: Why isn’t the `domain-decision-structure` Artifact more detailed?

We looked into various ways of constructing this, including more detailed statistics. At the end of the day our processes have to be understandable and easy to re-use. The process already takes a flow-chart to understand, and we felt that we got the balance right. Of course, as a user of this data, you are welcome to further refine and verify it.

Presenting PIDapalooza 2019

Christine Cormack Wood — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

PIDapalooza, the open festival of persistent identifiers is back and it’s better than ever. Mark your calendar for Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 and send us your session ideas by September 21.

Yes, it’s back and – with your support – it’s going to be better than ever! The third annual PIDapalooza open festival of persistent identifiers will take place at the Griffith Conference Centre, Dublin, Ireland on January 23-24, 2019 - and we hope you’ll join us there!

Hosted, once again, by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, PIDapalooza will follow the same format as past events – rapid-fire, interactive, 30-60 minute sessions (presentations, discussions, debates, brainstorms, etc.) presented on three stages – plus main stage attractions, which will be announced shortly. New for this year is an unconference track, as suggested by several attendees last time.

In the meantime, get those creative juices flowing and send us your session PIDeas! What would you like to talk about? Hear about? Learn about? What’s important for your organisation and your community and why? What’s working and what’s not? What’s needed and what’s missing? We want to hear from as many PID people as possible! Please use this form to send us your suggestions. The PIDapalooza Festival Committee will review all forms submitted by September 21, 2018 and decide on the lineup by mid-October.

As a reminder, the regular themes are:

PID myths: Are PIDs better in our minds than in reality? PID stands for Persistent IDentifier, but what does that mean and does such a thing exist?
PIDs forever - achieving persistence: So many factors affect persistence: mission, oversight, funding, succession, redundancy, governance. Is open infrastructure for scholarly communication the key to achieving persistence?
PIDs for emerging uses: Long-term identifiers are no longer just for digital objects. We have use cases for people, organisations, vocabulary terms, and more. What additional use cases are you working on?
Legacy PIDs: There are of thousands of venerable old identifier systems that people want to continue using and bring into the modern data citation ecosystem. How can we manage this effectively?
Bridging worlds: What would make heterogeneous PID systems ‘interoperate’ optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? What about standardized link/relation types?
PIDagogy: It’s a challenge for those who provide PID services and tools to engage the wider community. How do you teach, learn, persuade, discuss, and improve adoption? What’s it mean to build a pedagogy for PIDs?
PID stories: Which strategies worked? Which strategies failed? Tell us your horror stories! Share your victories!
Kinds of persistence: What are the frontiers of ‘persistence’? We hear lots about fraud prevention with identifiers for scientific reproducibility, but what about data papers promoting PIDs for long-term access to reliably improving objects (software, pre-prints, datasets) or live data feeds?

We’ll be posting more information on the PIDapalooza website over the coming months, as well as keeping you updated on Twitter (@pidaplooza).

In the meantime, what are you waiting for!? Book your place now – and we also strongly recommend that you book your accommodation early as there are other big conferences in Dublin that week.

PIDapalooza, Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 - it’s a date!

Bridging Identifiers at PIDapalooza

Joe Wass — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hello from sunny Girona! I’m heading to PIDapalooza, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It’s all about to kick off.

One of the themes this year is “bridging worlds”: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some “traditional” identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers. But, gathered in Reykjavik, under dark Icelandic skies, I met oceanographic surveyors assigning DOIs to drilling equipment, heard stories of identifiers in Chinese milk production and consoled librarians trying navigate the identifier landscape.

In addition to the usual scholarly publishing and science communication crowd, it was encouraging to see a real diversity of people from different walks of life encounter the same problems and work on them them collaboratively. The thing that brought everyone together was the understanding that if we’re going to reliably reference things – be they researchers, articles they write, or ships they sail – we need to give them identifiers. And those identifiers should be as good as possible: persistent, resolvable, interoperable.

Who cares about PIDs?

At the turn of the century, a handful of publishers came together to create Crossref (or CrossRef as it was in those days). It was becoming increasingly important to be able to store references in machine-readable format, but publishers were faced with a problem. If an author wants to cite an article, they’ll do so without worrying who published it. This means they needed an identifier system that worked across all publishers. Thus the Crossref DOI was born.

Today we’re heading toward 10,000 members, and the thing that they have in common is that they all produce scholarly content and care about how it’s referenced. As a trade association, we effectively act on behalf of all of our members, allowing them to register their content, share metadata and links, and assign an identifier.

But there’s a whole world out there. Publications have never been the be-all and end-all of scholarship, but they have been a backbone. But more and more scholarship, especially science, is done outside journal publishing. Sometimes it’s done on platforms that care about the scholarly record as much as publishers. And sometimes it isn’t.

The Twitterverse

Lots of people use Twitter to talk about science. Some are scientists, some aren’t. Scientific articles are linked from news reports and discussed on blogs. Gone are the days of scholarly articles being cited only by other scholarly articles. We see links coming in from all over the place. And, although not all of this can be counted as the “scholarly record”, some of it could be.

The barrier-to-entry for journals publishing means that science journals contain only science articles. The barrier-to-entry for Twitter means that anyone can, and does, publish there. My Twitter feed is finely balanced between bibliometrics research, marine biology and pictures of snow leopards with Japanese captions. I don’t understand all of it, but I like looking at the pictures.

Back in the days when the only references to scholarly publications were from other scholarly publications, it was easy to keep track of those references. When an article was published, its references went into a citation database. This happened because the publisher considered this important.

But Twitter, the publisher of tweets, doesn’t care. It is used for a huge variety of communications and although some people choose to use it to engage in scholarship, we’re just a blip on their radar. The same goes for Reddit, a platform that describes itself as “the front page of the Internet”. There are communities engaged in scientific discussions, but Reddit doesn’t feel the need to publish its bibliographic references.

Nor should it.

Bridging those who care with those who don’t

The barrier-to-entry for contributing to scientific discussions has lowered, meaning that the role of more non-specialist platforms has increased.

I imagine that there are other communities out there who have their own concerns about the web. Maybe there are model train enthusiasts who want to keep track of every reference to a particular model. Or political commentators who want to keep track of how certain politicians and policies are discussed. As the scholarly community embraces new platforms for communicating, we should recognise that we are part of a broader universe of people using those platforms for more diverse reasons.

Gone are the days when the only way to reply to an article was by writing a letter to the editor. But also gone are the days when you could guarantee that your letter wouldn’t appear next to cat pictures (assuming you weren’t writing to the Journal of Feline Medicine & Surgery). As a specialist community cohabiting online spaces with non-specialists, it falls to us to do whatever we need to adapt that space and make it our own. In our case, this means recording bibliographic references as and where they occur.

Something like this happened once before. As traditional publishers went online, they created Crossref to build and maintain the necessary infrastructure. We’re acting on behalf of the community again to collect links from non-traditional sources. Because we can’t go to platforms like Twitter and say “please deposit your references”, we’re doing the opposite. We identify a platform, then work out how to scrape its content and extract links.

Working at scale

So we’re broadening out the universe of references that we would like to track from “traditional scholarly publishing” to “the entire web”. There are four broad challenges inherent in this, and we think that Crossref infrastructure is the right way to meet them.

The first challenge is physically finding the links. Because social media platforms aren’t specialised for scholarly publishing, they don’t have the same mechanisms in place for capturing bibliographic references. This means that we have to do it ourselves by scraping webpages for references. As the standard-bearer for scholarly PIDs, we think we can do a good job of this.

The second challenge is doing this at the scale of the web. Because we might, in theory, find a link on any webpage, there is a literally infinite number of publishing platforms. From big websites like BBC News down to tiny blogs run out of a bedroom. It would be impossible to partner with each of these individually. The way to solve this is to run a centralised service which goes out and contacts as many sources as possible. This role is a collaborative one. Our system is open to inspection, suggestions and contributions from the community.

The third challenge is the sheer number of publishers. Because they all register content with us, we are in good position to track their DOIs. In addition to that, every member of Crossref publishes content on their own platform, and has their own set of websites to track. We monitor our members’ websites and create a central list of domains that we look for. If this wasn’t done centrally, each publisher would have to run its own web crawlers and perform the same work, only to filter out their own links.

The fourth challenge is how to get all that data to the public. Even if every publisher were able to run their own infrastructure, it would make it very difficult to consume. Through Crossref metadata services, publishers have built a system where you can look up metadata and link to articles without worrying who published them. We think that the same approach should apply to this new link data.

For these reasons, we’re building Crossref Event Data: a system that monitors as many platforms as we can think of, and brings them into one place, and serves the whole community.

Building bridges

If you’ve been following along you’ll know that my last metaphor was the process of refining crude oil. I like metaphors, and mixing them. After all, you can’t mix a good metaphor without breaking a few eggs into the mixing bowl. Today’s metaphors are bridges. And not just one.

Bridge 1: PIDs and URLs

In the world of Persistent Identifiers, we’re quite good at linking. organisations like Crossref, DataCite and ORCID run separate systems but we work together to record and exchange links. But the web is different. There’s no single organisation in control and there are many organisations working to catalogue it. Event Data is our offering: bridging the web with our identifiers.

Bridge 2: Scholarly link providers

Of course, some platforms and systems do care about persistence and Persistent Identifiers. Event Data is an open platform, and we’re collaborating with a few providers to publish links.

We’ve partnered with The Lens to include Patent to DOI references. We’re working with F1000 to include links between reviews and articles. Hopefully we’ll see more organisations use Event Data to publish their links.

Bridge 3: Crossref / DataCite

Event Data is a collaborative project between DataCite and Crossref. When Crossref Registered Content contains a reference to a DataCite DOI we put it into Event Data. DataCite do the same in reverse. This means that Event Data contains a huge number of article - dataset links.

Bridge 4: Traditional discussions vs new ones

At each moment, scholarly discussions are happening in the literature, on various social media platforms and on the web at large. They are all talking about the same thing, but are spread out. Event Data collects links wherever we find them and brings them into one place. By doing this we hope we can help bring those conversations together.

Bridge 5: Bridging bibliometricians and altmetricians to data sources

Capturing links from social media to published literature underpins the field of altmetrics. By collecting this data and making it available under open licenses, we bring it to altmetrics researchers. We don’t provide metrics, but we do provide the data points that can form the basis for research.

Without infrastructure for collecting data, researchers would have to perform the same work over and over again. Because the data is all open, we allow datasets to be republished, reworked and replicated.

Bridge 6: Bridging the Evidence Gap

Running Event Data involves collecting a lot of data - gigabytes per day - and boiling it down into hundreds of thousands of individual Events per day. People consuming the data may want to do further boiling down. At every point of the process we record the input data that we were working from, the internal thought process of the system, and the Events that were produced. A researcher can use the Evidence Logs to trace through the entire process that led to an Event.

We’re a bridge from websites and social media to data consumers. But we take the role very seriously, and there’s nothing hidden. A glass bridge, you could say.

Interesting challenges

It’s not all plain sailing. There are a few challenges along the way to collecting this data which anyone who wanted to collect this kind of information would face. By collecting it in a central place and running an open platform we can solve each problem once, and improve our process as a community.

One problem is choosing what to include. We include any link that we find from a non-publisher website. That means that invariably some of the links are from spam. This problem isn’t new: we see low-quality articles being published in traditional journals from time to time. We try to include all of the data we can find and pass it onto consumers. They might want to whitelist certain sources, or they may want all of the data because they’re trying to study scholarly spam. We have decided to provide data as Events, which strike the balance between atomicity and usefulness.

Another, which I talked about at last year’s PIDapalooza, is how we track article landing pages. Read the blog post, the user guide or hop in a time machine if you’re interested.

The thing about bridges…

… is that they help people get where they’re going. With a few notable exceptions, they’re not the main attraction. We play a humble part in scholarly publishing, helping collect and distribute metadata. Most of what we do goes unseen, and helps people create tools, platforms and research. Event Data is an API, and whilst we hope people will build all kinds of things with it, including altmetrics tools, we’re not making another metric.

PIDapalooza

All of which brings me to my talk, which I’m giving on Wednesday: Bridging persistent and not-so-persistent identifiers. I would tell you about it, but there isn’t much more left to say.

If you want to find out more, we’re currently in Beta, and open for business. Head over to the User Guide to get started!

The PIDapalooza lineup is out; come rock out with us at the open festival of persistent identifiers

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

PIDs’R’Us and if they’re you, too, please join us for the second PIDapalooza, in Girona, Spain on January 23-24, for a two-day celebration of persistent identifiers.

Together, we will achieve the incredible - make a meeting about persistent identifiers and networked research fun! Brought to you by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, this year’s sessions are organized around eight themes:

PID myths
Achieving persistence
PIDs for emerging uses
Legacy PIDs
Bridging worlds
PIDagogy
PID stories
Kinds of persistence

The program is now final and there really is something for everyone (well, every PID geek)

Hmm, Do Researchers Need to Care about PID Systems? Excellent question.
We’ll hear Stories from the PID Roadies: Scholix.
Nevermind the The Bollockschain and other PID Hallucinations.
An intriguing session on #ResInfoCitizenshipIs?.
There will be a plenary by Johanna McEntyre on As a biologist I want to reuse and remix data so that I can do my research.
And we’ll enjoy another plenary from Melissa Haendel (title to be confirmed).

With half the places already booked, now’s the time to register and plan your trip. We hope to see fellow festival-goers there for some PIDtastic party time (and actually some epic serious conversations).

Contact me via the steering committee at PIDapalooza@datacite.org with any questions, music requests, or backstage passes.

Full lineup

View the Crossref LIVE17 agenda.

PIDapalooza is back and wants your PID stories

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Now in its second year, this “open festival of persistent identifiers” brings together people from all walks of life who have something to say about PIDs. If you work with them, develop with them, measure or manage them, let us know your PID adventures, pitfalls, and plans by submitting a talk by September 18. It’ll be in Girona, Spain, January 23-24, 2018.

One of the great strengths of last year’s PIDapalooza was the number of people who spoke and all the conversations that were kindled. So if you’re thinking of going, we encourage you to propose a talk, so we can hear what you’re working on and you can get some feedback.

At the inaugural PIDapalooza event Crossref took to the stage twice, with Ed Pentz covering Org IDs and Joe Wass talking about Event Data.

Here we have Joe’s memories of the event and Ed’s update on the Org ID status.

Joe Wass reflects:

At Crossref, the subject of Persistent Identifiers is something we care deeply about, and linking between DOIs, ORCID iDs and other identifiers is the reason we get up in the morning. But a whole conference dedicated to them? If I’m honest, the first time I heard about PIDapalooza I thought the subject was rather niche.

How wrong I was. It turns out there are people from all walks of life who care about “things” using persistent identifiers to link, describe and reference them. There was a great balance between presenters and attendees, and the programme meant that lots of people had a chance to speak. We heard about identifiers for research vessels, pieces of scientific equipment, individual bottles of milk, plus the usual subjects like scholarly publishing, datasets, organisations and funders, and how to cite them.

Between sessions we chatted over a wide range of subjects, noted similarities between subject areas, offered advice and exchanged ideas. Who knew this stuff was all related?

Ed Pentz on plans for the new organisation IDs

An important presentation at the 2016 PIDapalooza meeting was on organisation identifiers. A week before the conference Crossref, DataCite and ORCID released three documents for public comment outlining a proposed way forward. The goal is launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. At the packed PIDapalooza session Crossref, DataCite and ORCID gave an update on their work over the previous year and their proposals going forward.

There was a lively discussion and debate about the issues. Following the meeting the three organisations set up the OI Project Working Group with a broad group of stakeholders. The group has been meeting over the last year and will release two documents next week - a set of Governance Recommendations and Product Principles and Recommendations for community feedback. So watch this space.

The PIDapalooza conference really helped galvanize the work in this area by bringing together a broad range of people interested in persistent identifiers. If you have an idea about PIDs, please come and tell us about it.

Check out the decks from last year's talks, the PIDapalooza website with all the info, and sumbit a proposal for your talk before September 18.

Announcing PIDapalooza - a festival of identifiers

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The buzz is building around PIDapalooza - the first open festival of scholarly research persistent identifiers (PID), to be held at the Radisson Blu Saga Hotel Reykjavikon November 9-10, 2016.

PIDapalooza will bring together creators and users of PIDs from around the world to shape the future PID landscape through the development of tools and services for the research community. PIDs support proper attribution and credit, promote collaboration and reuse, enable reproducibility of findings, foster faster and more efficient progress, and facilitate effective sharing, dissemination, and linking of scholarly works.

We believe that by bringing together everyone who’s working with PIDs for two days of discussions, demos, workshops, brainstorming, updates on the state of the art, and more, we can make this happen faster. And you can help by giving us your input on which sessions would be most valuable. Please send us your ideas, using this form by September 18. We will send session proposal notifications the first week of October with the festival lineup.

Register to attend

Registration is now open — come join the festival with a crowd of like-minded innovators. And please help us spread the word about PIDapalooza in your community!

Stay updated with the latest news on on the PIDapalooza website and on Twitter (@PIDapalooza) in the coming weeks.

Looking forward to seeing you in November!