Project deliverables

This document identifies gaps in existing PID infrastructures, with a focus on ORCID and DataCite Metadata and links between contributors, organizations and artefacts. What prevents us from establishing interoperability and overcoming barriers between PID platforms for contributors, artefacts and organisations, and research solutions for federated attribution, claiming, publishing and direct data access? It goes on to propose strategies to overcome these gaps.

Comparison of metadata schema for ORCID, DataCite, Dublin Core, CASRAI, MODS and DDI regarding contributors, organizations and artefacts.

This document defines the THOR project communications plan and strategy including stakeholder analysis, objectives, methods, and a timeline for delivering these. Externally, we will direct capacity-building resources to sections of the community, and bring feedback to bear on improving and refining those resources. Internally, information will flow between project partners, with the findings and lessons from each task being used to shape and populate our external communications and with feedback flowing in each direction. Our strategy will evolve over the lifetime of the project to meet newly discovered needs gained through this feedback. Through nuanced, targeted communication we will not only promote PID adoption, but will also gain insight into the requirements of our stakeholders and build the infrastructure they really need.

This report describes the work of the THOR Project to develop a dashboard to monitor interoperability of persistent identifiers. The dashboard is an essential step towards a suite of tools to measure the impact of the project.

In this report we describe the current state of the art for persistent identifier linking in scholarly e-Infrastructure, with a focus on persistent identifiers for contributors and data. We look at persistent identifier linking between datasets, for example different versions of the same data, as well as linking data with other resources, including articles, contributors, institutions,and funding information.

  • De Mello, Guilherme et al. (2016). D3.1: Demonstration of Services to Integrate ORCIDs into Data Records and Database Systems. Zenodo. doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.58971

This report summarises progress on integrating ORCID iDs into production services in major databases at three different organisations and disciplines, namely EMBL-EBI for life sciences, PANGAEA for earth sciences, and CERN for high-energy physics. ORCID integration is enabling these services and databases to automatically link deposited datasets with the unique and persistent identifier of contributors, thus facilitating unambiguous credit for the production of datasets. We discuss the requirements, challenges and lessons learned.

  • Dallmeier-Tiessen, Sünje, & Dasler, Robin. (2016). D5.2: Analysis and Comparison of Persistent Identifier Use and Integration across Disciplines and Sectors. Zenodo. doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.154592

In order to evaluate the outcomes of THOR project and the continued sustainability of its outputs, it is necessary to continuously monitor the evolution of the PID ecosystem. Within THOR, we have developed systems and tools with which to conduct this monitoring. This document describes our initial observations, the challenges faced, and recommendations for how to solve them. This is an interim report. It will be updated with final results at the end of the THOR project.

This report summarises progress on enabling researchers and other contributors to associate datasets with their ORCID record. This is an important advance in enabling unambiguous attribution and credit for research. We describe requirements, results, and challenges informed by implementations in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and high-energy physics.

  • Interim version: Chen, Xiaoli, Dallmeier-Tiessen, Sünje, Dasler, Robin, & Lavasa, Artemis. (2017). D5.4: Business Plan for Sustaining the THOR Federated PID Infrastructure and Services. Zenodo. doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.569862

This interim report outlines the considerations of sustainability of the THOR project − an EU-funded project seeking to establish a sustainable international e-infrastructure for persistent identifiers. It reviews the initial business plan from the project’s proposal for continued relevance, considers the sustainability activities of DataCite and ORCID as key THOR infrastructural partners, and provides a set of open questions to guide the project’s future work. The final report will ultimately result in a business strategy for THOR outputs.

  • Dallmeier-Tiessen, Sünje, Dasler, Robin, Trzcinska, Anna, & Tsanaktsidis, Ioannis. (2017). D5.5: Release Note for the THOR Dashboard. Zenodo. doi: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.826163

The THOR dashboard was first released in March 2016. Discussions with stakeholders and reviewers, as well as changes in available resources and project priorities have prompted a series of updates. Suggestions were incorporated, engineering was improved to make the dashboard more scalable, robust, and easier to maintain. This report summarises the changes included through June 2017.

  • Fenner et al. (2017). D2.3 Investigations into Extending Domain-Specific Implementations for PIDs.

This report describes work done in four areas: linking people and data, data citation, persistent identifiers in different communities, and organization identifiers. This report wraps up the joint research effort in the EC-funded THOR project and highlights that we can take full advantage of persistent identifiers only if we move beyond globally unique and persistent identifier strings, but instead use them as enablers of a much wider connecting interoperability infrastructure.

In this document, we look at three aspects of the resolution of identifiers to a URI representing the resource: dynamic data citation, content negotiation, and machine-enabled licence information. We found the RDA best practices for dynamic data citation to be consistent with our recommendations for using DataCite DOIs for datasets, but neither fragment identifiers nor template handles, as alternative approaches, appropriate for this task. Content negotiation resolves a resource, expressed as URI, to a number of differ-ent representations. We describe its status and open issues as implemented by THOR partners EMBL-EBI, ORCID and DataCite, and DataCite’s refactored and re-launched DOI content negotiation service. We discuss the need for normalisation of machine-readable licence information to enable rights-based query filtering, and the need for common file formats that combine content and metadata for datasets to enable large-scale adoption of direct machine-enabled access to data for re-use across information providers.

  • De Mello, Guilherme et al. (2017). D3.3: Services that enable integration and cross-linking across different types of identifiers and data types. Zenodo. doi: [https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.890959](https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.890959)

This report summarises progress for disciplinary cross-linking of identifier systems and the results obtained from the perspective of each THOR project partner organisation, in particular disciplinary data repositories. We describe requirements, results, and challenges informed by implementations in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and high-energy physics.

  • Stocker et al. (2017). D3.4: Services that enable well-formed data citations.

Data citation is a key enabler of credit for publishing data. We discuss recent developments within disciplinary data repositories and PID infrastructure aimed at making citing data easy. We discuss how data centres in four scientific domains meet the data citation principles and recommendation of FORCE11 and RDA. These efforts are a key contribution to advancing the human practice of citing data and thus improving credit for publishing data.

  • De Mello et al. (2017). D3.5: Operational services.

This report describes work undertaken by the THOR project to integrate PID services into operational systems including disciplinary data repositories. It also discusses key factors for the maintenance of such services, and improvements to PID infrastructures to support these and further integrations.

  • Duine et al. (2017). D4.2: Plan for the dissemination and exploitation of project results.

This document provides the project and the EC with a record of the planned dissemination and exploitation of results and gives an overview of the activities we undertook to achieve our communications objectives. We describe how we addressed the recommendations of the interim evaluation and report. We also give descriptions of the materials we developed and the events we organised to build the human infrastructure around persistent identifiers.

  • Brown et al. (2017). D4.3: Engagement report

In this document we describe how our communications activities have shaped the ‘human infrastructure’ around PID adoption. We describe THOR’s impact on different stakeholder communities and how we have amplified our reach across disciplines, regions and through the ambassador network. Three case studies demonstrate how THOR has engaged with a variety of stakeholders and has delivered a wide range of high-impact communications outputs.

  • Chen et al. (2017). D4.4: Capacity-building report

Throughout the project lifetime, a wide range of outreach activities were carried out to engage the scientific and scholarly communication communities across EU regions. This deliverable reports in depth on one main approach that THOR took to take on the capacity building task - the THOR bootcamps. Envisioned as an intensive training package to drive home conceptual understanding of PIDs as research infrastructure, and technical knowledge of PID service implementation, the bootcamps took a multi-day format and delivered tailored content to a diverse set of audiences. This document describes the design and execution of the event series, demonstrates the impact it has achieved, and summarises the lessons learned from the event organisation process and the communities we connected with.

  • Dasler et al. (2017). D5.2: Analysis and comparison of PID use and integration across disciplines and sectors.

In order to properly evaluate the adoption levels of PID services, it is necessary to continuously monitor the evolution of the PID ecosystem. We have conducted an analysis of PID services, i.e. ORCID and DataCite, and this document describes observations, challenges and recommendations. Particular emphasis is given to discipline-specific and regional differences and developments, and to possible ways of addressing observed gaps. These analyses assisted the THOR project in identifying challenges and appropriately targeting the identified gaps.

  • Dasler et al. (2017). D5.3: Evaluation report on project outputs and alignment with objectives.

This report is a self-reflection on the burgeoning impact of the THOR project, alignment of activities against objectives, and observations from the perspective of the sustainability activity stream.