A summary of the outputs from the Organisational Identifiers Working Group, part of the Jisc CASRAI-UK pilot, in particular the report reviewing selected organisational IDs and development of use cases. Presented at Jornadas FCCN, Lisbon, Portugal 10th Feb 2015.

1. Jisc CASRAI-UK pilot - organisational identifiers
Christopher Brown
1oth Feb 2015
Jornadas FCCN

2. Introducing Jisc
2
Jisc offers digital services for
UK education and research.
The charity does this to
achieve its vision for the UK
to be the most digitally
advanced education and
research nation in the world.
Jisc.ac.uk
© Isaxen via Flickr

3. What does Jisc do?
3
Does 4 things…
Providing and developing a
network infrastructure and
related services that meet the
needs of the UK research and
education communities
Supporting the procurement
of digital content for UK
education and research
Our network of national and
regional teams provide local
engagement, advice and
support to help you get the
most out of our service offer
Our R&D work, paid for entirely
by our major funders, identifies
emerging technologies and
develops them around your
particular needs

4. The UK research context: General
4
» Many institutions and research institutes (within and outside universities)
» Many research funders (UK Research Councils only 30% of total research
income)
» Varied infrastructure – Institutional Repositories,CRIS’s (one of these or neither)
» Changing environment
› Mandates effecting research information and research data
› Increasing importance of external (non-governmental) funding
› Interdisciplinary and international focus

5. The UK research context: policies and mandates
5
» Research excellence Framework (REF) from the four university funding bodies* -
research impact (REF2014 published, preparation for 2020 - awaiting guidance)
» REF open access policy - to be eligible authors accepted manuscripts must be deposited
in Institutional Repositories (journal material)
» Research Councils UK (RCUK)- 7 subject based research councils: the RCUK Policy on
Open Access aims to achieve “immediate, unrestricted, online access to peer reviewed
and published research papers, free of any access charge”
» To help implementation - new funding policy block grant to Universities to cover cost of
Article Processing charges (APC’s)
» EPSRC Research Data Mandate – universities set in place processes and practices to
ensure curation and preservation of research data (create roadmap for compliance and
act on it)
*Higher Education FundingCouncil for England (HEFCE), Scottish FundingCouncil (SFC), the Higher Education FundingCouncil for
Wales (HEFCW) and the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL)

6. The UK research context: RIM
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» Not a shared national reporting infrastructure
» Funders & agencies
› Funder systems’ landscape is complex (and somewhat ad hoc): Je-S;
ResearchFish, Research Outcomes System; Grants on theWeb; REF; HESA
» Universities
› Institutional systems landscape is complex (ad hoc): 60 using CRIS/Cerif,
spreadsheets, repositories used by many, 125 HEIs with an Institutional
Repository
» Information required for both day-to-day management, funding requirements
and strategic decision making

7. Jisc – How are we helping
7
» Support universities core business and help make research
process more productive
› Developing shared services/infrastructure where appropriate
› Supporting implementation of key standards
› Providing a channel for universities requirements with funders,
vendors etc.
› Getting everyone together

8. Introduction to CASRAI
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» International community of leading research funders and
institutions collaborating to ensure seamless
interoperability of research information
» Develop and maintain a common data dictionary and
advocate on best practices
»Consortia Advancing Standards in
Research Administration
Information (CASRAI)

9. »Dictionary defines key terms or information elements
which relate to the management of (for example):
› Research grants
› CVs
› Data management plans
› Controlled vocabularies
› Authoritative lists
› Identifiers
Introduction to CASRAI
9

10. Jisc CASRAI-UK pilot
» UK CASRAI summit in December 2012, decision to
› set up and run three working groups on priority topics
› support discussions in other areas (e.g. equipment profiles and
research ethics) if required.
» Set up a National Review Circle which includes a wider group of
people that are interested in the progress of CASRAI-UK and who
will provide advice and feedback on working group outputs
» Other objectives include exploring how the CASRAI governance
arrangements could work in a UK context beyond the pilot and an
evaluation of the pilot
10

11. Jisc CASRAI-UK pilot
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» Jisc and CASRAI are piloting three National Working Groups in the
UK
› Data Management Plans
› Organisational (Authoritative) Lists
› Open Access Reporting
» Each at different stage of process but has charter and plan
» Pilot ends March 2015
» Future working groups?
» Evaluation

12. OrgId Working Group - Objectives
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» Identify main candidate sources of OrgIds
» Subject them to common use cases which are relevant to
universities and other parts of the RIM and RDM workflow
» The main output will be a common statement about how the UK
research community should use OrgIds and the policy requirement
in order for harmonised OrgIds to work
» Develop a sustainable process for maintaining authoritative lists of
organisations in the CASRAI dictionary
» The membership of this working group includes representatives
fromARMA, Research Councils, HEDIIP, BL, CrossRef,Wellcome
Trust, CRIS system vendors and UK HEIs

13. OrgId Working Group - Outputs
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» Organisational Id Landscape Study – a report to inform the
Working Group on the current use of organisational identifiers
was commissioned and delivered (Sept 2013)
» Organisational Id Review – commissioned by theWorking Group
to review a core set of organisational identifiers (ISNI, Ringgold,
Digital Science and UKPRN) (Dec 2014)
» Use cases – based on key use cases from the Research Lifecycle,
these have been identified by the Working Group and further
developed under the OrgId Review (Dec 2014)

14. Landscape Study –Terms of Reference
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» Interview representatives within the working group to establish
what authoritative lists of organisations involved in UK research
are being, or could be, used; determine use cases based on
organisational identifiers used, the problems encountered and
the approach they are currently undertaking
» Produce a landscape review of organisational identifiers
currently used, and for what purpose, in the UK
» Look at “organisational” identifiers in its broadest sense.This
would, therefore, include “institutions”, as well as “funders” and
other types of organisation

15. Landscape Study- Summary
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» Examined the landscape of organisational identifiers in the UK and identified
23 different IDs
» Based on interviews with key individuals
» Lots of detail on use cases for publishing, funders and institutions
» Stakeholders interviewed for this study typically described identifying
organisations as “a nightmare”, specifically disambiguation and deduplication
» Benefits from effective unique identifiers are truly realised when data is
shared
» Key aspects of identifiers that support the widest range of uses:
› Governance,Trust,Transparency,Temporal, Appropriate Metadata
› Of these, the “temporal” information is perhaps the most challenging to address

16. Landscape Study - Recommendations
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» None of the identifiers investigated fulfils the role of being an “authoritative list” of organisations
involved in research.They are all constrained in scope
» ISNI and UKPRN both have traction, and warrant particularly careful consideration by the
working group. UKPRN does not cover the full range of organisations involved in research, is
limited to the UK, and does not include departments, but is a robustly managed list that covers a
defined subset of organisations very well.The role of the registration agency in ISNI is crucial, and
whether the existing agencies offer appropriate services for this domain will need to be
considered
» The Research Councils, as major funders of research in the UK, should be closely involved in the
development of any new identifier system. At present, ROS, ResearchFish and Gateway to
Research all use their own identifiers
» Given the range of existing identifiers, any new identifier system should only be developed and
introduced if there is clear evidence of demand, and sufficient buy in to ensure that it is
universally adopted
» The authority can remain separate from the identifier (for example, it would be feasible to
establish an authority list with appropriate metadata but using the ISNI as the identifier)

17. OrgId Review –Terms of Reference
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» Clarify a representative but not comprehensive set of use cases for the UK research
community to use organisational identifiers
» Survey and interview a small number of well-informed people in the field in order to
create and prioritise a list of desirable features for the provision of OrgIDs and potential
services built around them
» Check the use cases and these required features against four* possible candidate OrgIDs
and their providers
» Inform theWorking Group of the review’s conclusions and, if appropriate, make
recommendations for adoption by the UK research community
*Four candidates = ISNI, Ringgold, UKPRN, Digital Science

18. OrgId Review – Use Cases
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» UC1 - Researcher applying for funding As a Researcher applying for funding, I need to list multiple organisations related
to my proposal in order to enable the target funder to uniquely identify previous employers and other funders, collaborators or
industry partners and beneficiaries.
» UC2 - Funder: minimising conflicts of interest As a funder preparing to find referees or reviewers, I need to be able to
identify suitable people in order to minimize conflicts of interest (through potential co-location at host institution).
» UC3 - Funder - tracking published outputs As a Funder, collating outputs in end-of-research reports, I need to be able
to track published outputs in order to understand our contribution & successful collaborations.
» UC5 - Researcher or research manager - reporting academic impacts to funders As a research producer,
I need to report academic impacts to different funders with different requirements.
» UC6 - Researcher - tracking organisations across time As a researcher I need to preserve the historical integrity of
organisational names at the time of data creation, collection or deposit (and other, specified times); it is similarly important, however,
to record and retain the links between these differing names, so that any user can see which data came from which organisation, even
if the organisation name has changed.
» UC7 - Repository manager - populating repositories, managing automation As a repository manager I
need to be able to uniquely identify my repository, whether or not its location or URL changes; this will enable me to control semi-
automated population of repository records.
» UC8 - Developer - directory services As a developer for research funders, I need to link an OrgID within my application to
a directory service.This will allow an end user or a machine to verify identity and contact details.
N.B. UC4 was deleted early in the review

19. OrgId Review – Candidates
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» UKPRN
› www.ukrlp.co.uk
› UK Register of Learning Providers is a register of legally verified learning providers in UK
› Each verified provider will be assigned with a unique provider reference number UKPRN
› Information shared across sector with agencies (e.g. Skills Funding Agency, Higher Education
Statistics Agency, HE Funding Council for England and Universities and Colleges Admissions
Service)
» Digital Science Institute Database
› Public beta Feb 2015 http://idb.datasci.it
› Global coverage of organisations that feature in the scientific lifecycle
› 25,ooo organisations expected to be indexed by release
› Metadata includes names, aliases, urls, wikipedia pages, types, relationships and addresses,
with all address data linked to geonames
› Substantial amount of this database available for free under a CC-BY licence

20. OrgId Review – Candidates
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» ISNI http://www.isni.org/
› Holds public records of over 7.49 million identities including 7M individuals (800K are researchers) and 490,000
organisations
› ISNI database is a cross-domain resource, contributed to by 29 institutions and databases, and 40 major national
and research libraries
› Part of the suite of ISO identifiers (along with ISBN, ISSN, etc.).
› Its governance infrastructure is designed with the purpose of ensuring the long-term viability of the identifier.
› ISNI is a bridge identifier, designed to provide interoperability between different proprietary identifiers, such as
the Ringgold ID and a critical component in Linked Data and SemanticWeb apps
» Ringgold www.ringgold.com
› A registration agency for ISNI
› Identify database contains 400,000 organisation records with organisational identifiers and associated metadata
› The database is global and covers all market sectors, including universities, research centres, funders,
corporations, non-profit organisations, government entities and organisations, healthcare and hospitals, schools
and public libraries
› It contains basic location metadata and is not designed to replace existing identifiers but to provide a bridge
between them across multiple parts of the wider creative industries
› Not replacing the Ringgold ID with the ISNI number, but will provide the ISNI number along with the Ringgold ID.
The ISNI number is designed to sit above the proprietary identifier to link systems of identifiers together as a
bridge identifier.

21. OrgId Review – Candidate check against use cases
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22. OrgId Review – OrgIds in use
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The following two tables list the desirability of features we asked about, in descending order of agreement
(according to the 16 respondents). [Note:The letter-designations of each feature refer to discussions in the report.]

23. OrgId Review – Characteristics of an OrgId Service
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24. OrgId Review - Recommendations
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25. OrgId Review - Recommendations
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» TheWorking Group should consider recommending a hybrid approach with ISNI as the backbone. Institutions
and others needing to register and use OrgIDs should use a solution which relies on and feeds the minimum
data set curated by ISNI
» In considering registration solutions and value-added services, organisations should bear in mind that, in the
short term, Ringgold is the most developed agency conforming to recommendation 1
» Expect that soon there will be other service providers working to deliver value added services on top of ISNI and
theWorking Group should do what they can to encourage such competition by, for example, DigitalScience,
who should consider the possibility of acting as a registration agency for ISNIs in a similar way to Ringgold
» Jisc should investigate the possibilities and costs of a bulk deal for UK academic institutions for value added
services with Ringgold and (in time) with other service providers
» CrossRef should consider creating and maintaining a crosswalk or table of equivalence betweenFundRef IDs
and ISNI, either through a direct relationship with ISNI or through a third party / registration agency.
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has recently become a registration agency for ISNI and the review
recommends that HEFCE and the British Library discuss whether it would be appropriate for there to be a UK-
based registration agency and how bulk creation/checking of ISNIs (and bulk registration and/or the creation of
a table of equivalence for UKPRNs) might take place for UK academic institutions and other organisations
involved in research

26. OrgId Working Group – What next?
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» Statement of Agreement – currently being drafted
› A draft statement based on the recommendations from the OrgId Review Report
and discussions with the OrgIdWorking Group.The purpose of this statement is for
key organisations such as Jisc, RCUK, HEFCE, etc to sign up to.
» Testing
i. A merged list of organisations, created from UCL's interactions with Wellcome,
should be submitted to ISNI to test the quality of the UCL/Wellcome data and the
quality and timeliness of the existing ISNI data and their response
ii. "sandbox" experiments should be set up with Ringgold, Digital Science and ISNI to
look at whether the data tested in [i] (or a subset) is capable of providing the basis
for a value added solution with the present state of orgID services.
» Post-pilotWorking Group
› Pilot ends March 2014 -> future relationship with CASRAI
› ReviewWorking Groups

27. Further Information
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» CASRAI/Jisc National Network: Jisc.ac.uk
» CASRAI website casrai.org
» Jisc CASRAI-UK pilot blog jisccasraipilot.jiscinvolve.org/
» Organisational Identifiers
› Landscape study - http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5381/
› Review & use cases - http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5853/

28. Find out more…
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Christopher Brown
Senior Co-design Manager,
Jisc
christopher.brown@jisc.ac.uk
@chriscb
Except where otherwise noted, this
work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND