Last January the PIDapalooza community gathered again in Dublin for their third annual meeting – the previous ones were in Reykjavik (2016) and Girona (2018). There is a common theme for all these meetings: How can we best use the so-called “persistent identifiers (PID)” in the future to ensure that scientists can be linked to their research outputs as unambiguously as possible?
The range of topics covered by the presentations and posters in Dublin was a broad one. Ideas were presented for the systematic indexing of research data and conference contributions. New initiatives such as "make data count" dealt with the framework conditions for a resilient data usage metric, another presentation proposed ways for an open and PID-based access to bibliometric data (www.opencitations.net). The ORCID-community presented its current programme in the form of a kind of circus event - original, if also a little bit striving.
One of the main threads of the event was on initiatives to improve access to organisational affiliations. The new ROR (Research Organisation Registry) Initiative was discussed as an idea in Girona a year ago, and in Dublin it was presented at a pre-conference event the previous day. The mood was good, the expectations of the participants were high and the marketing for the new initiative also left little to be desired. The new website at www.ror.org/search already allows the existing entries to be checked, and the discussion is now moving onto how to maintain such an ambitious registry. Ideas like national contact points were floated at this pre-conference event that will surely gradually lead to an improvement in the coverage. There’s a ROR community twitter hash at where updates can be followed until the next PIDapalooza event arrives.
Selected presentations and posters of the event are available in Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/communities/pidapalooza19/. The ROR blog is also worth following for updates on the progress of the initiative.
