Busy season for Ringgold

As the spring conference season is replaced by hot days and holidays, the Ringgold team is hard at work. By the time leaves turn colour, we will have completed an entirely new web interface for the Ringgold Identify Database, mapped the Open Funder Registry identifiers, and created institutional affiliation links for authors listed within ProtoView records. These efforts are among several initiatives intended to build upon Ringgold’s clean and reliable data to enable access and produce better analysis. Of course, in many respects, it is business as usual, and we have a lot of things to tell you about.

Industry acronym alert: PIDs

You’re going to hear the term “PID” (Persistent Identifier) a lot in the coming year. Although we at Ringgold have a long history of appreciation for identifiers, the topic has emerged as an important technical topic throughout Scholarly Publishing. So much so, that there will be a full blown PID festival @pidapalooza in Reykjavik Iceland on November 9th & 10th. For more information about the event visit pidapalooza.org

What can we talk about for two days? Consider that the ORCID, the Ringgold ID, the ISNI, DOIs, even ISBNs and ISSNs are all examples of important PIDs in our industry; two days won’t be enough to sort the world’s problems, but it will be a good start. Ultimately, we all have an interest in clearly identifying entities of all types, and doing so in a way that compliments the efforts of others. The term “PID” is important because identifiers are the key to creating clean, interoperable data that will ultimately benefit every member of the supply chain.

Identify Database User Group meetings – June & September

The SSP Conference in Vancouver BC was the perfect place to kick off Ringgold’s series of Identify Database User Group Meetings. With the hum of nearby floatplanes taking off in Vancouver Harbor, our clients and partners came together on June 3 to hear where Ringgold and the Identify Database are heading next. A big thank you to our speakers: Alice Meadows of ORCID began the afternoon by detailing the importance of joining personal and institutional IDs.

Next, Thomson Reuters’ Chris Heid shared the experience of integrating Identify to support clean author affiliations across the range of 6,000 journals on the ScholarOne Manuscripts platform. And Keith Layson of AAAS/Science told of how his colleagues are using Identify to not only analyze market potential, but also to break down barriers between data silos and leverage their own business intelligence more effectively. Thanks also to the clients who attended, bringing great energy to our discussion of Identify’s practical applications and thoughts on our development. Click here for the slides.

Next up, our European Identify Database User Group Meeting is scheduled for Wednesday September 14 2016. The breakfast meeting is taking place just prior to ALPSP in London, and we hope you will attend. Register now to join the discussion.

Identify Online upgrade news

Identify Online (IDO) is the web-based interface providing access to the Ringgold Identify Database. It was originally developed as an internal tool, and was released to our customers nearly 10 years ago. Now the time has come for IDO to undergo a major upgrade – in fact, it is being completely rebuilt. While we do not yet have an official release date, we can report that development is going smoothly and as expected. A great deal of time went into planning the new system, and that work is helping us now during the execution phase of the project.

Internal testing will commence as soon as functional deliverables are available, and there will be a fast track toward customer testing and release of IDO2. We will be engaging customers for testing the new system later this summer. If you are interested in testing the new system, drop us a note at info@ringgold.com.

New customers

Ringgold welcomes the following new clients:

• Brill
• Cengage Learning Ltd
• Pelagic Publishing
• Rheinwerk Publishing
• University of Melbourne

Identify Delta files are coming

We have received a number of enquiries from customers about the supply of Deltas (our weekly changes to the Identify Database) and we are pleased to let you know that we are currently working on the provision of Deltas to our local load Identify Database customers. We have just starting customer testing for the Deltas and we will let all of our customers know when we are ready to supply these routinely.

One million and counting: Identify & ORCID reach a milestone together

As of May 2016, more than 530,000 ORCID records have at least one educational affiliation selected from the Identify Database, and almost 490,000 have at least one employment affiliation selected. That’s right, more than 1,000,000 authoritative links between researchers and their institutions have been made since we began our collaboration in 2013, helping to connect the scholarly community and advancing the potential for analysis and synthesis of new knowledge. Read the ORCID case study on our website.

New address for ProtoView

ProtoView moved offices in January this year. For rapid service, we want to be sure everyone ships their books to the right address. Please update your information to: Suite A, 7515 NE Ambassador Place, Portland OR, USA 97220.

Keeping Identify up-to-date

A full review of UN and OECD hierarchies has recently taken place. In addition, several university hierarchies have been updated due to name changes. These include:

• Ringgold ID 12872 Kinki University, was Kindai University
• Ringgold ID 66390 Education University of Hong Kong, was Hong Kong Institute of Education
• Ringgold ID 6029 Radboud Universiteit, was Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
• Ringgold ID 1421 Augusta University, was Georgia Regents University
• Ringgold ID 6221 Western University, was University of Western Ontario

Also, in association with the Portuguese Government’s Foundation for Science and Technology, over 200 Portuguese research institutes have now been added to Identify.

Summer availability & support

Ringgold services will be operating normally over the UK August Bank Holiday and US Labor Day weekends, but with reduced staffing levels. Emails will be monitored during the entire holiday period, although customers may not hear from their usual contact.

Please send any issues and questions to info@ringgold.com or visit our Customer Support site for immediate in-depth help for all our services http://support.ringgold.com