Improving Domain Repository Connectivity: Establishing a Baseline — Metadata Game Changer

"As I have been working with domain repositories to understand and describe their practices and apply for Core Trust Seal certification, I have been struck by the close, long-term relationships that these repositories form with their communities. In some cases, like UNAVCO, the repository is an integral part of an extensive community support system that extends from proposal planning and writing, through project initiation and implementation, data collection, management, and archive, to publication of results and access to data by other community members. Scientists, engineers, logistics specialists, data managers, software developers, and educators work together to create and extend our understanding of the shape of the earth and how it changes (the science of Geodesy).  The UNAVCO Community described the responsibilities of players in open science communities during 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1029/2012EO260006) and developed an open data policy based on those responsibilities. These responsibilities included identifying datasets with PIDs and connecting data to papers with citations, that is, establishing an important element of the PID Graph: connections between papers and data. I introduced the concept of Connectivity last month and have been thinking about it ever since. Connectivity measures how well research objects or collections of research objects are connected to the global research web, represented by the PID Graph. These connections depend on identifiers for all kinds of research objects. I am initially focusing on people, identified by ORCIDs, and organizations, identified by RORs. As the breadth of identifiers and connections continues to expand, I made the leap from the strong connections between real people and organizations in the UNAVCO Community and connections between these entities in the PID Graph. Specifically, I wondered if the multitudinous real-world connections could help populate identifiers in the metadata and related connections in the PID Graph. I begin the exploration of this question here with UNAVCO datasets described in DataCite...."