Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications: What, Why, How, Where, and Who? 

Christine Orr, Ringgold’s North American Sales Director, spoke at the SSP Annual Conference on Thursday June 2 2016.

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are vital to a strong research infrastructure. Unambiguous connections between people, places, and things that PIDs enable build trust in, improve discoverability of, and enable recognition for research contributions. And, in a world where researchers and their institutions are increasingly required to report on their research contributions across multiple systems, it’s critical to be able to do so in as simple, streamlined, and accurate a way as possible.

PIDs can help by enabling the automated processes, validating and ensuring correct attribution of works, and facilitating discoverability across multiple platforms and systems. This session brought together representatives from organizations that create different types of PIDs with those who use them. The panel demonstrated how they are being used in researcher systems and workflows, provided an update on recent and upcoming developments, and discussed the challenges and opportunities for widespread adoption of PIDs across the scholarly community.