The document discusses the THOR project, which aims to place Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) at the fingertips of researchers and integrate them into existing research services and outputs. The goals are to uniquely attribute work to researchers and make PID use the default across the research lifecycle. The project focuses on biological sciences, earth sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It provides examples of how PIDs can improve credit for researchers, discoverability and reuse of data and publications, demonstrate value for data centers, improve evidence for publishers, and measure impact for funders.
3. Technical and Human
infrastructure
for Open Research
Our goal is to ensure that every
researcher, at any phase of their
career, or at any institution, will
have seamless access to
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for
their research artefacts and
their work will be uniquely
attributed to them
4. THOR project summary
• Goals
• Place PIDs at the fingertips of researchers
• Integrate PIDs into services researchers already
use
• Ensure PIDs are embedded in research outputs
• Making persistent identifier use for people and
research artefacts the default
• Establishing seamless integration between
articles, data, and researchers across the
research lifecycle
• Focus areas
• Biological and Medical Sciences
• Environmental and Earth Sciences
• Physical Sciences
• Social Sciences and Humanities
• Basic Info
• Started June 2015 – 1 year ago
• Funded under H2020
• http://project-thor.eu
7. Researcher stories: taking credit, sharing freely
• When Alice started at the institute, she received an ORCID that uniquely identifiers
her. Great, as she has a common name.
• She has gathered critical new climate data and shares it through a trusted data
centre listed in re3data.
• The data centre connects her ORCID to the DataCite DOI for her data.
• She can also connect her ORCID with earlier research in the data centre portal.
She selects her papers and claims them to her ORCID profile.
• Her supervisor explains that earlier, they would not have shared the data until it
was presented in a journal article. Now others can reuse it much sooner.
8. Researcher stories: discovering and reusing
• Yannis checks out the latest publication from the Compact Muon Solenoid
experiment in Physics Letters B. He decides to compare the results to a
model that he has been developing.
• He follows a DOI link for the data behind the plots to the HEPData
repository. On HEPData, he can follow DOI links to software models that use
the data.
• He reviews these models closely to understand how they differ from his. One
is new to him. He reviews the author’s Inspire profile to learn more about
their approach.
9. Data centre manager: demonstrating value
• Michele is a Data Centre Manager preparing for a bi-annual review. Renewal of
funding depends on demonstrating levels of data citation and re-use.
• This is almost too easy! He has ready access to the information that he needs. The
DataCite Event Data service notifies his database whenever the DOI for one of the
datasets from his centre is cited.
• Datasets, articles, contributors, and institutions are all interlinked.
• This is so much better than when he needed a team to scan through publications
and tease out references to data in running text and footnotes.
• He has time to look for high impact datasets, follow ORCID links to the researchers
that used them, and contact them directly to understand how the data made a
difference in their work. Quantitative analysis is great, but so are quotes!
10. Publisher stories: better science with better evidence
• Paola is the editor-in-chief at a major journal. She just issued another retraction for
an article. The reason? Errors in the data made conclusions unreliable. The error
was caught by a graduate student who failed to replicate the result and who shared
the author’s refusal to provide access on twitter.
• She wants to reduce the chance that this happens again – at least on her watch.
This means that the data needs to be included in peer review, placed in a trusted
repository, and linked from the article.
• The journal’s publisher is able to help with all of this because their system is
already integrated with trusted data repositories from re3data and PID services.
• Paola will need to set a new policy and work with her editors and authors to get
them to accept it.
11. Funder stories: measuring impact, managing portfolios
• Magda manages a portfolio of research grants. She needs to demonstrate
the spread of the ideas and outputs from her portfolio.
• Fortunately, all of Magda’s grant holders use ORCIDs within her agency’s
systems and when they produce work. Instead of an unpredictable
acknowledgement text, they include the Open Funder Registry ID.
• It is easy for her to gather the information that she needs linking her agency,
grant holders, and their research outputs.
12. Support the use of persistent identifiers
across the research life cycle
Ideas Research Publish results
Search Find! Reuse and evolve
Impact
Credit
14. Research
• Pragmatic focused research
that influences services and responds to challenges
• Identify gaps in adoption, metadata,
ability to link across schemes
• How can we facilitate information
exchange on a technical level?
• What limits capacity building and growth?
• How can we support alternate and related identifiers,
equivalence, versioning, dynamic data
• Organisation and funder IDs
papers
datasets
software
authors
institutions
funding
more!
15. Development
• Putting research into practice!
• Towards integration into key production services at CERN,
EMBL-EBI, Pangaea, British Library
• Expanding production services through DataCite and ORCID
• DOI-ORCID integration
• ORCID auto-update, dataset claiming
• Best practices:
• well-formed data citations
• citation of dynamic data or data subsets
16. Outreach
• Exploring with different stakeholders:
• Publishers, developers, librarians,
researchers, funders, data scientists
• Knowledge Hub: https://project-thor.readme.io
• Upcoming training events… join us or request one!
… PASIG 2016, e-IRG Workshop,
Sci-GaIA and TANDEM workshop,
WACREN Conference, Our Digital
Future, Ambassadors Webinar,
UKSG, EGU 2016, Force 2016,
CSV Conf, 15th Research
Data Management Forum,
SSP Conference, CRIS 2016,
Open Repositories 2016,
International Data Week…
17. Get involved!
• We want to hear about requirements, use cases, and
stories from researchers, funders, publishers,
universities, data centres and beyond
• Ambassadors spread the word within their own
communities, encourage best practices and
drive adoption
• http://project-thor.eu/become-an-ambassador/
18. Sustainability
• http://dashboard.project-thor.eu
• Developing performance indicators for:
• interoperability establishment
• service integration
• capacity building
• Tracking adoption:
• DataCite and ORCID stats APIs
• Following particular use-cases and events
