PIDapalooza 2020: a review

Tue, 05/05/2020 - 12:36 -- euroCRIS Secret...
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Jan Dvořák, euroCRIS Board member and CERIF Task Group Leaderhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8985-152X              Jürgen Güdler, euroCRIS Board memberhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5026-0287                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        The fourth PIDapalooza festival took place end-of-January in Lisbon, Portugal. As usual, the event offered the opportunity to get into conversation with well-known partners of euroCRIS such as ORCID, DataCite, Crossref or the California Digital Library – these were the organizations behind the conference – but also to establish new exciting contacts and witness progress reports for many euroCRIS-related topics.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Maria Fernanda Rollo, professor for science history at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FSCH), ensured a strong opening with her key note “PIDs for a new generation of knowledge creation and management paradigm in Portugal: from vision to reality”. Portugal already made a name for itself in the CRIS world some years ago with the establishment of its national PT-CRIS framework. Rollo now reported on another milestone that was reached with the mandatory introduction of a national scientist-ID (and student ID) (compatible with ORCID, but with far greater coverage). This ID is beside many others the base of Ciência Vitae, a national CV-system. Rollo explained that the main goal of the initiative was to get as many players around one table as possible and to convince them all to participate in the system. The message that ultimately convinced everyone was "less bureaucracy".                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Brian Matthews and Anders Sparre Conrad of EOSC (the European Open Science Cloud) informed that it has recently published its PID Policy and is asking for comments.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        A number of start-ups were present at the event. AcademyLabs serves industry demand for innovative ideas by tracking research groups: it uses a network of collaborators to do that. Rescognito records and presents recognition for the activities that have so far been done for free by researchers, such as reviewing or work in committees.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        And of course, Digital Science was also present. Suze Kundu informed of plans to track datasets in the company’s Dimensions solution. The company itself seems to have attracted a good number of people who had previously worked in other CRIS-related companies.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        We also heard stories from late phases of projects. Paul Walk of DCMI raised the issue of the PURL identifiers infrastructure slowly deteriorating. Luc Boruta informed of the state of MERIL, the European directory of research infrastructures, whose stakeholders seem to have somehow run out of steam. Unless a solution is found, this could easily result in Europe not knowing its research infrastructures.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  EuroCRIS board member Jan Dvořák presented his research on the quality of person identification using the Czech national CRIS, where two parallel identifiers are present. A bit like the proverbial man with two watches, Dvořák was trying to establish how many researchers there are in a specific group. Jürgen Güdler, the second board member at PIDapalooza, presented a work-in-progress CRIS project which the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation (DFG)) will publish by the end of the year. More than 50,000 DFG projects from 1920 to 1945 will be researchable there. PIDs are the main key to link the data with various other sources (especially Wikidata) and thus enrich them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      As a kind of pre-festival, the Research Organization Registry Community (ROR) presented the status of their work one day before PIDapalooza started. There was a lot of progress to report, also concerning the financing: the fund raising initiated in the middle of last year has so far brought 100,000 dollars into the initiative's coffers (for more details see https://ror.org/).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      The topic of CRISs in fact resonated quite a lot through the conference. Persistent identifiers are great, but to supply that information, users will get the most benefit from them if they can use them through CRISs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Interested in more details? Most of the presentations of the event can be found here.