COAR launches task force on sustainable and interoperable PIDs models – COAR

"Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are an important part of the scholarly ecosystem. However the current global approach to PIDs excludes many developing regions and contributes to creating significant inequalities in the scholarly ecosystem. The costs of minting DOIs, for example, makes them unaffordable in most parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where there are often little or no budgets for these types of services. Furthermore, many international infrastructures do not support the language requirements of non-English countries.

Because of this situation, several organizations are developing their own solutions for PIDs that are more feasible for their local conditions. These initiatives are very important as they provide persistence to the scholarly record in those countries/regions. However, since metadata from international, centralised PIDs services is being heavily relied upon by indexing and discovery systems that track and analyse research impacts, there is a risk that these resources will not be recognised appropriately.

The aim of this task force is to address these issues by developing a conceptual model for a more distributed PIDs environment that (1) supports the needs of a variety of regions, and (2) is internationally interoperable with other PIDs initiatives (such as DOIs) and easily discoverable. An important aspect of this work will be to liaise with other related initiatives to raise awareness and collaborate on an acceptable path forward."