Welcome to the Winter Edition of Ringgold’s Quarterly Bulletin! We would like to wish all of our customers and colleagues a very happy holiday season and say thank you for your support over the past year.

2016 has been a year of development for both for Ringgold and the scholarly publishing community. We have seen widespread interest in, and adoption of, persistent identifiers (PIDs) to improve local data. To meet the demand, Ringgold has added staff, initiated our largest internal development projects, streamlined support, mapped new external identifiers to the Identify Database, formed new key partnerships, and recently accepted a position on a new industry working group to help address fundamental questions about PIDs for Organizations. It has been an exciting year, and we are looking forward to working with our customers to meet the challenges of 2017 and beyond. Please keep reading to learn more, and thank you once again!

Jay Henry, CMO.

Ringgold to Open ISNI for Organizations to the world

Ringgold, an ISNI Registration Agency, has released a free service to provide open access to the ISNI Identifiers and data for organizations. This includes:

• An API to obtain and resolve existing ISNIs for organizations
• A complete dataset download of ISNIs, organization names, locations, alternate names, and URLs
• A free online look-up service to search and obtain ISNI records

For full details and the official announcement please see our press release at http://www.ringgold.com/open-isni-announcement. For access to this free service please visit http://isni.ringgold.com.

Ringgold integrates Open Funder Registry IDs

Ringgold has mapped more than 11,000 Open Funder Registry IDs to its Identify Database of over 440,000 organizational records. The addition of the Funder IDs provides interoperability between the two datasets. By mapping Funder IDs to Ringgold’s Identify Database, organizations and publishers managing Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access journals will be able to fully automate the APC calculations for authors, funders, and institutions from a single source.

Furthermore, Ringgold customers will be able to readily identify funders from within the universe of organizational records in Identify. Read the full press release on our corporate website at https://www.ringgold.com/ringgold-integrates-open-funder-registry-ids/.

New customers

Ringgold welcomes our new customers:

• Peter Lang
• SLACK Inc

PIDapalooza

Jay Henry and Laura Cox attended PIDapalooza in Iceland in November, the first conference entirely obsessed with persistent identifiers (PIDs). It was an interesting couple of days with much discussion on organization identifiers. The event brought industry stakeholders together to lay out plans for a working group to ascertain the best path forward for an open organization identifier – not necessarily a new one, but something that will meet the specific needs of the research and funding communities. Laura has been invited to sit on the working group as a representative of both Ringgold and ISNI. Open identifiers such as ISNI already exist and may be candidates for a solution to the issues that the project sponsors have identified… time will tell.

Development update: The New Identify Online

Technical solutions require high-tech care and nurturing. Over the past year, Ringgold initiated several important development and maintenance projects. The largest: a complete overhaul of our customer-facing portal, Identify Online. Through this process we have been able to improve the look, feel, and functionality of the interface and gain insight to our own data. The final phase of development is underway and is scheduled to conclude with internal and customer testing early in the new year. We are excited about the new features and ease of use, and look forward to sharing these with you soon!

Keeping Identify up-to-date

Our professional team of over 40 international researchers keeps the Identify Database current. Last quarter our work included a detailed review of Ringgold ID 467065 Serviço Nacional de Saúde (Portuguese National Health Service). Based on authoritative information provided by the Portuguese government, over 200 Identify Records were added to the health system hierarchy, including regional and local Health departments, hospitals and health centres.

Records within another large hierarchy, Ringgold ID 54744 Russian Academy of Science, have also been reviewed after the institution was brought under government control. All associated Ringgold Types and Tiers have been updated accordingly, and full Identify Classifications have been added to each record.

Other notable changes to report:

• Ringgold ID 423342 Baylor Health Care System merged with Scott and White Healthcare. Healthcare. The name has been updated to Baylor Scott and White Health.
• Ringgold ID 19166 URS Corp merged with Ringgold ID 102388 AECOM Technology Corp.
• Ringgold ID 6617 Alcoa Inc separated off its automotive and aerospace industries into a new company called Arconic Inc, new Ringgold ID 468956.

Consortium Directory Online growth

There are now 488 consortia records in the directory. These are constantly being reviewed by our team. Recent updates this quarter include:

• The membership for Ringgold ID 442251 e-ShodhSindhu, which has increased significantly with 72 AICTE-funded engineering colleges joining India’s Consortium for Higher Education Resources.
• Ringgold ID 158764 Health and Biomedical Information Network (HBI Net), the consortium of Iranian medical universities, with the latest information on members and licence agreements added. We have also updated Ringgold ID 206566 CONSIRAN, the consortium of Iranian state funded universities and research centers.
• Ringgold ID 42263 NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) has been joined by the Catholic University of America, Drexel University, Emerson College, and SUNY New Paltz during the course of 2016.

New additions:

• Ringgold ID 469455 TRAILS (Treasure State Academic Information and Library Services)

Please let us know if there’s a record you wish us to review immediately or if there’s other consortia you’d like to see included. You can email us at info@ringgold.com, or you can reach us via the dedicated CDO feedback form.

Help us welcome Beth Hoskins to Ringgold

The Sales Department is pleased to announce that Beth Hoskins has joined Ringgold as our new Sales Development Manager effective Monday November 28.

Beth will report directly to Christine Orr, and support the sales team with analysis of the global market for Ringgold’s Identify-based services. In addition, Beth will also be pursuing new business and supporting existing clients in the North American market. We are very pleased to be able to expand the sales team, and respond to the growing market for Ringgold data and services.

Beth brings to the team a wealth of experience from her time at publishers Oxford University Press and Duke University Press, and at WT Cox, an intermediary subscription agent. While at Duke and OUP, Beth has used Identify data to support her work, and this client-side perspective is especially relevant in her new role.

Christmas availability

Ringgold will be closed December 25-27, and January 1-2. Holiday staffing levels will be maintained through the last week of December and first week of January. Please send any issues or questions to info@ringgold.com. Emails will be dealt with throughout the holiday period, although customers may not hear from their usual contact.

The Identify Database local load will be available as normal over the Christmas period. The Identify Online service will be updated daily except on December 25-27, and January 1-2. The Validate service will be available as usual, but we are not guaranteeing a 24-hour turnaround on new records submitted between 24th December and 2nd January.

Customer Support

Don’t forget, our customer support website is available 24/7 at http://support.ringgold.com. Find help for all of our products and easy access to user guides, editorial policies and news.