The document discusses unique identifiers for institutions and individuals. It provides information on several identifier schemes, including ISNI, ORCID, and Ringgold IDs. ISNI aims to uniquely identify parties like authors, contributors, and publishers involved in creative works and distribute those IDs across databases. ORCID provides identifiers for researchers and links them to their work. Ringgold IDs identify institutions with rich metadata. Wide adoption of these identifiers helps disambiguate people and organizations and link them to research outputs throughout the scholarly communications system.

1. ICEDIS Meeting at UKSG
16th April 2014
Phil Nicolson

2. The supply chain (simple version)
Consortium
Author
Submission
and Peer
Review
System
Publisher
Online Host
or
Technology
Partner
Subscription
Agent or
Sales Agent
Fulfilment
House or
System
Library
Discovery
Service
End User
Data
Providers and
Systems
(multiple)
Consortium
Societies
Funders

3. Why now?
 Number of journals increasing by 3.5% per annum*
 Number of articles increasing by 3% per annum, current output is
1.8-1.9 million per year*
 Number of researchers increasing by 3% per annum*
 Now stand at between 6 and 9 million (depending on definition)*
 Increased demand for anytime/anywhere access
 Growth in use of online systems for discovering and distributing
content has increased the need for unambiguous identification of
people and parties exchanging that content
* Ware, M and Mabe, M, The STM Report, 2012

4. Unique Identifiers
What are they? How can they help?
 Numeric or alpha-numeric designations which are associated with
a single entity
 Entities can be an institution, person, or piece of content
 Enable the disambiguation of each entity
 Proper understanding of the customer, author, reader or
institution
 Proper identification of content object, article, product, or
package
 Can be used internally or in conjunction with external partners

5. What are Institutional Identifiers for?
Disambiguating:
 UCL:
 University College London (UK)
 Université Catholique de Louvain
(Belgium)
 Universidad Cristiana
Latinoamericana (Ecuador)
 University College Lillebælt
(Denmark)
 Centro Universitario Celso Lisboa
(Brazil)
 Union County Library (USA)
 University of Oxford
 Univ. Oxford
 Oxford University
 Library, Oxford Univ.
 Radcliffe Science Library
 Bodleian Library
 Bodleian, Oxford
 Oxford, University of
Consolidating:

6. What are Individual Identifiers for?
Disambiguating:
 Wang
 Li
 Smith
 Jones
 John J Smith
 J.J. Smith
 Smith, J
 Smith, John J
Consolidating:
Simplifies challenges associated with name changes
Simplifies challenges associated with career progression

7. Institutional Identifiers – which ones?
 JISC and CASRAI (Consortia Advancing Standards in Research
Administration Information) report on Organisation IDs:
http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5381/1/CC549D001-
1.0_org_ID_landscape_study.pdf
 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

8. CASRAI report
 Disambiguating organisational information from multiple
sources typically described as “a nightmare”
 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

9. Identifiers identified
Identifier
Coverage
Mainly
usedfor
linking
Regulated
Curated
Historic
HEIs
Companies
Funders
Publishers
Name Global ● ● ● ●
Dun & Bradstreet Global ● ● ● ● ● ●
FundRef Global ● ●
ISNI Global ● ● ● ● ● ●
ORCID Global
Ringgold's Identify Global ● ● ● ● ● ●
MACE & UK Federation Global ● ● ● ● ●
VIAF Global ● ●
Research Analytics Global ● ● ● ●
Companies House UK ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Gateway to Research UK ● ● ● ● ●
Government bodies UK ● ●
HESA UK ● ● ●
IDBR UK ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Janet UK ● ● ●
Je-S/CDR OrgID UK ● ●
Research Fish UK ● ● ● ●
RCUK UK ● ●
ROS UK ● ● ●
UCAS UK ● ●
UKPRN UK ● ● ● ●
HEFCE England ● ● ●
PIC EU ● ● ● ● ●
Please note that ORCID had not
released the institutional
affiliation at the point at which
this report was published.
ISNI
ORCID
Ringgold ID

10. ISNI
 International Standard Name Identifier
 ISO 27729
 Key Statistics
 ISNI holds public records of over7.49 million identities, including:
 7 million individuals (of which 800,000 are researchers)
 490,000 organisations
 The ISNI database is a cross-domain resource, contributed to by 29
institutions and databases, and 40 major national and research
libraries
 http://www.isni.org/

11. ISNI
 “The mission of the ISNI International Authority (ISNI-IA) is to
assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer,
artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique
identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name
ambiguity in search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned
ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that
every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its
creator wherever that work is described”
 Example: 0000 0004 1936 8948

12. ISNI
ISNI Number ISNI Number
Party ID 2Party ID 1
Proprietary
Information and/or
Metadata
Proprietary
Information and/or
Metadata
“ISNI will act as a bridge
identifier across multiple
domains and become a
critical component in
Linked Data and
Semantic Web
applications”

13. ISNI

14. ORCID
 ORCID is designed to persistently identify and disambiguate
scholarly researchers and attach them to research output.
 ORCID identifiers utilize a format compliant with the ISNI ISO
standard.
 ISNI has reserved a block of identifiers for use by ORCID, so
there will be no overlaps in assignments.
 Recorded as http://orcid.org/0000-0001-2345-6789
http://about.orcid.org/
http://www.isni.org/

15. ORCID
 Key Statistics
 Live ORCID IDs: 643,043
 ORCID IDs with at least one work: 132,705
 ORCID provides two core functions:
 a registry to obtain a unique identifier and manage a record of
activities.
 APIs that support system-to-system communication and
authentication.

16. ORCID

17. Ringgold IDs
 375,000 Institutional records
 Hierarchical
 Rich metadata
 Working closely with the ISNI Technical Committee
 Ringgold data considered base data for institutional records
 Ringgold will be providing ISNIs within our data
 Ringgold is an ISNI Registration Agency
 Working closely with ORCID

18. Ringgold IDs

19. Diffusion
Consortium
Author
Submission
and Peer
Review
System
Publisher
Online Host
or
Technology
Partner
Subscription
Agent or
Sales Agent
Fulfilment
House or
System
Library
Discovery
Service
End User
Data
Providers and
Systems
(multiple)
Consortium
Societies
Funders

20. Diffusion
 ORCIDs appearing in publications
 Ringgold to supply ISNI IDs
 ORCID using ISNIs to identify institutional affiliations
 Proquest’s Scholar Universe is ingesting ISNIs into it’s database
 MacMillan is using ISNIs within their Digital Science service
 Bowker has ingested 2 million ISNIs into Books in Print
 British Library Ethos database allowing researchers to import data
into their ORCID record and will be able to attach ORCIDs to their
thesis in Ethos
 CISAC running their royalty system based on ISNIs
 Wikipedia is ingesting ISNIs

21. Phil Nicolson
Data Manager
Ringgold
Phil.nicolson@ringgold.com