OA Switchboard one year live: Community, collaboration, and delivering on the promise of PIDs

"Day-to-day, the OA Switchboard is enabling the neutral exchange of OA-related publication level information. In terms of developing and maintaining our central information exchange hub as an operational solution, this is all about shared infrastructure, standardised messaging protocol, and integration with existing systems, powered by Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).

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The vital contribution that PIDs can make to systemic efficiencies was highlighted in a recent UK Government's policy paper on reducing bureaucratic burdens on research, innovation and higher education. Commissioned by Jisc, the UK PID Consortium published a cost-benefit analysis in June 2021, which identified cost savings associated with rekeying grant, project, and article metadata. Other savings, in the form of automation and aggregation/analysis were reported as likely to be significant. Economic benefits of better data for decision-making by both public and private sector bodies was reported to have even more potential. Other tangible benefits reported included consistency of approach, portability of metadata and workflows, and increased ease of collaboration.

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The OA Switchboard is contributing to the potential of PIDs by providing a solution for a real pain point shared by research funders, institutions and publishers: the fulfilment of OA publication-level arrangements (policies, mandates, agreements, etc). To address the use cases via the OA Switchboard community and realise practical solutions via the ‘hub’, PIDs are indispensable. Participants in the OA Switchboard are collaborating to share best practices and implement these existing identifiers in their workflows and systems. This will bring direct, indirect and community benefits that will extend way beyond OA Switchboard supported use cases...."