The case for using PIDs extensively and consistently has more or less been made which begs the question as to why they are not implemented as completely as one might wish?
The ARDC, through our National Information Infrastructure program, promotes the use of PID’s in the Australian research sector as a mechanism to link research concepts, funding, outputs, people, organisations, instruments, and objects; thereby creating a richer, more reliable, more coherent, more reproducible, and more reusable research environment.
Through this program the ARDC provides, supports and connects with several persistent identifier services including DOI, IGSN, Handle, ORCID and PURL.
In addition, the ARDC provides actual infrastructure and project funding and support so we are ourselves deeply interested in both the ability of PID’s to enable new and better research as well as how they can be used to reflect the impact of our activities. The question “how is the world better because it invested resources in the ARDC?” is key. The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) was created to answer this question, being a model which links activities, inputs and outputs in the research lifecycle.
For ARDC to rely on PID’s we need to assume the identifier infrastructure itself is persistent and sustainable.
So, as an infrastructure operator with a particular set of drivers and desired outcomes from the use of PID's we’d like to ask some questions around whether harmonisation (and consolidation?) of PID’s and PID providers might facilitate sustainability (it’s perhaps easier to fund a PID provider who does it all?) and implementation (would it be easier to implement and use PIDs if they followed the same minting, usage, and governance models?).
Think of this as a devil’s advocate session, I’d love to understand if there are reasons why harmonisation and consolidation are not sensible next steps now that the use case for PID’s (but PID’s in total rather than as individuals) has more or less been made.
How would you run the session to support the spirit of PIDapalooza as a laid-back, welcoming, energetic and exciting meeting, and ensure at least 10 minutes of your session are used to interact with the audience?
Ideally this session would be largely audience interaction. The questions to be posed range from the peripheral (“how might PID organisations share good practice?”) to fundamental (“Why, now that PID’s have been shown to be critical, would I not just set up an international PID organisation with my other government colleagues and standardise it all?”)
That second question might be a bit much, but you did ask for energetic and exciting!
