Tracking scientific output across the web | iSGTW

"Scientific output is not just about academic papers. Datasets, along with other products of research, such as software and various forms of multimedia, also need to be made citable so that sharing and reuse can be facilitated, as well as tracked. In order to achieve this, these outputs must be given persistent identifiers similar to the digital object identifiers (DOIs) assigned to academic papers. Two weeks ago, the ODIN project held its first-year conference at CERN, with delegates discussing the barriers stakeholder groups encounter and how these could be resolved to enable an interoperable layer of persistent identification on both a European and a global scale. ODIN stands for ‘The ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network’. It is a two-year project, which started in September 2012 and is funded by the European Commission under its FP7 scheme. DataCite works to assign persistent identifiers to datasets, while ORCID focuses on providing persistent identifiers to researchers themselves, so as to solve issues related to name ambiguity. Both organizations have the overarching goal of facilitating better scientific research. These efforts are of particular relevance to large research organizations like CERN, where some high-level datasets have recently been made available to other scientists for re-use.  Equally, the large numbers of collaborators working on the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider can make correct attribution of articles and datasets challenging, too. Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen, part of CERN’s Scientific Information Service group, also reported at the event on efforts in INSPIRE, the high-energy physics information hub, to accurately attribute articles and now published data to their authors ..."