ORCID, RRID’s and Research Objects, Oh My!

Abstract

To support superior ways of sharing scientific, medical and engineering knowledge, Elsevier has been an active participant in a plethora of research projects, multi-stakeholder communities, alliances and data standards organisations. As an example, we will discuss how Elsevier has contributed to organisations that advocate and govern the use of unique identifiers throughout the scholarly lifecycle. The shared use of unique identifiers for finding and linking to papers, authors, and institutions has been an area where Elsevier has invested in, from the beginning. After the resounding success of the Digital Object Identifier project, which lead to the foundation of CrossRef, a multi-stakeholder organisation that manages DOIs across the publishing landscape, Elsevier was one of the founders of ORCID, intended to assign unique identifiers to scientists. Further cross-stakeholder initiatives for identifying objects to improve findability were pursued through Force11, a multi-stakeholder organisation to improve scholarly communication, which Elsevier staff helped co-found. The RRID project advocates and governs the use of identifiers for key research resources (such as antibodies and model animals) and the Data Citation Principles advocate a common model of sharing, citing and attributing datasets, based on DOIs for Datasets. These principles have been brought to bear inside the open Mendeley Data platform, where unique identifiers are assigned to datasets, and even versions of datasets, so that distinct iterations of a collection of research data can be cited and found. Currently, Elsevier staff are collaborating with the University of Manchester to build a portal to generate identifiers for bioinformatics workflows, based on Manchester’s ‘Research Object’ specification. This will allow bioinformatics researchers to link their software, data inputs, outputs, and publications together in a single ‘Research Object’, which can be found, cited, and linked to publications.