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Why should universities care about identifiers?

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:19:53 +0000

Why do identifiers matter for research?

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter. Clearly, any such strategic decision-maker will long have been aware of the demands of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which successful reporting of the best research outputs of university departments is crucial to the on-going funding of the institution. This is particularly central to the work of research-led universities, which is an increasingly competitive sector: even universities that formerly focussed more on teaching than research are increasingly aware of the need to drive up standards of quality research in order to secure additional funding.

The reality of unique identification in research

However, as anyone who has actually engaged with the business of research reporting to any degree will tell you, it is far from a superficial or trivial matter to carry out such an exercise without thinking very carefully about how researchers are identified; moreover, identifying the research groups, departments, projects and institutions that they may have variously belonged to at different times, all of which may have been re-organised on many occasions, is a considerable challenge raising considerable technical as well as organisational issues.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all derives from the scale of research reporting. On such a massive scale, it has to be done in a systematic way across higher education institutions in order to be useful. Any lack of a systematic approach in collecting the information on the institutional level will inevitably result in higher costs in processing the information later into a useful form, for example by governmental organisations such as HESA and the Research Councils (RCUK) relevant to each area of academic study. This may be carried out for a variety of reasons, amongst them for example:

The need to produce statistics at a national and at an institutional level in order to gauge how successful different parts of the research community are performing in comparison to each other and to similar institutions internationally, which may be a determinant of how funding is allocated.
The production of good, widely accessible information about the work of academic researchers and research groups for the purposes of future research, both in identifying research as a basis for future work and for guiding individuals and groups in terms of who they might work with in future, who their competitors may be, and in creating wider bibliographic information for a whole range of related purposes related to future publications.
Open Access, an increasing requirement imposed by funders where research is publicly funded.
Accountability in the use of public funds for research.

It is precisely the lack of a national approach to providing consistent metadata about individuals and groups connected with research that raises costs, creates inefficiencies and frustrates the development of new software functionality that makes the jobs of research managers more difficult and ultimately reduces the funds available to research and their best use within the sector. It is therefore the business of senior managers of academic research to care about identifiers.

Researcher identifiers: a crucial first step

Before any wider metadata about research may be considered, the most fundamental issue is identifying individuals who carry out research. Before this happens consistently on a national level, there is little point addressing the subsequent issue of identifying groups and institutions engaged in research consistently. It is also important to consider any national approach in terms of interoperability with other international approaches wherever possible: while, on the one hand, funders and statistics agencies can only hope to mandate national identifier schemes, at the same time it is clear that research collaboration is cross-institutional and international in scope, in some cases including researchers from numerous countries in one project or even in the production of one individual paper, data set or other research activity. This is the approach that has been taken by the JISC, together with RCUK, HESA and other partners in setting up the Research Identifiers Task and Finish Group, which is due to report in October 2012.

One emerging candidate with cross-sector and international support is the ORCID researcher identifier scheme, whose rapid development in 2011-12 is scheduled to culminate in a public launch in October 2012. There are, of course, existing, widely-used but relatively simple identifiers such as the HESA researcher identifier, and identifiers provided through commercial providers' web interfaces, but thus far these have not provided dependable unique identification. All such identifiers could be linked to a system like ORCID that is designed on interoperable principles and is not dependant on any particular software platform or web interface. An alternative approach is taken by the ISNI number: whereas ORCID seeks to offer individual researchers and institutions the ability to manage their data on a distributed model, ISNI represents a centrally moderated, bibliographic approach led by national libraries and other similar institutions with national and strategic responsibilities. It remains to be seen whether these different approaches are in competition or whether they will offer different but complementary functionality within the sector, and much may be dependent on how software vendors implement them.

Current Research Information Systems (CRIS)

It is not simply a matter of tracking publications and other related ouputs, for example in institutional repositories. This part of the equation is by now relatively well established in the UK HE sector, although it continues to develop: the issues surrounding Open Access, for example, have not been fully resolved. This, however, is just at the level of the final outputs of research and does not provide anything like sufficient insight into the processes of research, the projects and groups carrying out, the staff involved or the costs. Traditionally, this information has been gathered in a very long-winded process that is individual to each institution's particular workflows and processes (although there are obviously great similarities of approach between them), often a partly paper-based exercise that has been migrated to an extremely varied range of systems and databases, few of which are interoperable or complete. Many departments may be involved in the process apart from the institution's research office and the department in which the researchers are based, but perhaps the most significant would be the finance office, the human resources department and the library, to name just the key players. It will be necessary to keep some information confidential, e.g. personal staff information, salaries and so forth, to share some information internally and with research funders, and to publish other information, e.g. in a research repository that forms the institution's "shop window" of public outputs, library databases and so forth. The term Research Information Management (RIM) has emerged to cover all of these information gathering and information processing activities.

In order to do this systematically, more sophisticated research information management software has been developed, often known as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). The market in the HE sector is currently led, in terms of the number of institutions adopting the software, by PURE, produced by ATIRA; other major players are Symplectic Elements, and CONVERIS, produced by AVEDAS. More recent entrants to this market are Thomson Reuters' Research in View. There are currently no open source products, although a JISC-funded modular approach by the Research Management and Administration Service (RMAS) project may have an increasing impact in this area, depending on subsequent adoption by HE institutions. It is not an overstatement to say that HE institutions are currently in a rush towards early adoption of these CRIS systems, motivated by the need to use research data to compete with each other for funding opportunities.

Next steps: organisational identifiers

In the next 2-3 years, it is likely that the matter of unique researcher identification will be resolved through the emergence of a dominant standard that has sufficient take-up and leverage in the UK and international HE sector to faciliate the work of research institutions and funders. Following this, there will be organisational structures associated with research that will require unique identification, often on a multi-layed basis: for example, a project may be at several institutions, perhaps internationally, and their staff may be in various departments or similar units whose names have changed or have been merged or de-merged at various times, all of which will require careful date and time stamping to make the information reliable for the period that it covers. There will be issues related to copyright, commercialisation and spin-off companies that make the precise provenance of research critical to the future success of academic research and development. Standards for organisational indentifiers are therefore the next important issue on the horizon. Like researcher identification standards, research managers and senior managers with strategic responsibility for research will need to keep abreast of this rapidly developing area.

Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

Talat Chaudhri — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:42:00 +0000

The first meeting of the Researcher Identifiers Task and Finish Group was highly successful and productive because it kept a tight focus on developing an achievable, clearly articulated body of work and developing a process and timescale for the series of meetings that will inform this process and the commissioning and delivery of the reports that the discussions will continue to inform, round until January 2012.

The aim of the first meeting was to agree set of recommendations and collective requirements for Researcher IDs, decide on who else should form a part of future discussions, and decide on the precise scope and limits that the discussions and commissioned work should stay within. At the end of the discussions and after the conclusions of the reports and consultations, it is intended that the JISC should be in a position to commission a number of clearly defined pieces of work to begin implementation of the recommendations of the group.

The first decision was that only researcher identifiers, not institutional identifiers as well, should be considered as part of this work. The initial discussion reached agreement that, although crucial to many or most areas of research information management, the scope had to remain tighter during the limited time frame of these meetings in order to achieve concrete results rapidly. The question of when a person becomes a researcher for the purposes of the many and varied business processes in the UK HE sector is a complex one, and there was considerable discussion around this point. It was agreed that the work needed to concentrate specifically on the UK HE research information management regime, although it needed to be informed by international developments where that was relevant and appropriate to the UK context.

Many different business processes within universities in the UK HE sector were discussed, including but not limited to pre- and post-award grant management, research reporting, publications management, human resources for research and teaching, student monitoring including postgraduate records, statutory requirements such as Freedom of Information, league tables and government targets, and government open data initiatives. The tension between the needs and professional preferences of the researcher in maintaining control over their information and those of the institution in effectively carrying out these processes across multiple disciplines and departments at a managed, institutional level was a recurring theme in the discussions.

There was a focus on the need for technical interoperability with existing systems, in particular on linked data initiatives, especially where that concerns research data sets. The discussion identified several well known researcher ID schemes such as ORCID, HESA IDs and the 16 digit ISNI number. It was agreed that all of these discussions between stakeholders should be documented as a starting point. Suggestions were taken for which stakeholders were not yet present and who should therefore be invited, and it was agreed in particular that HEFCE needed to be represented in some way, whether or not they would actually commit senior staff time to be represented at the meetings directly. It was also suggested that a representative of the Wellcome Trust could be invited.

In summary, Neil Jacobs stated the overall modus operandi and aims of the group as follows:

The group will meet 5-6 times to develop recommendations.
All apart from the first and last meetings will be virtual meetings using Skype, telephone conference or an alternative technology if appropriate.
The dates of these meetings were to be set out at the end of the meeting (see below), following the discussions about the recommended work packages.
The group will be presented with pre-existing reports, e.g. ORCID and the Names Project, and these groups will be continuously consulted on the basis of feedback from the meetings, in a manner to be established as the need arises. For example, there will be a workshop at the end of the month to outline opportunities in identity management, from which a short briefing will be delivered to the group.
The stakeholders will faciliate discussion and provide information to the group.
Case studies will be used to map out the individual pieces of work that might be done to inform about options, risks, benefits in setting up an identifier infrastructure.
At the end of 6 months the recommendations that can be implemented on the basis of these discussions will be in place.
The final report in January 2011 will take a longer term view: there is no expectation that the infrastructure itself will be in place by then. This will be part of subsequent work and will come out of the recommendations that will be in place by then.

David Flanders then gave a brief summary of developments in the Names Project project, followed by brief summaries given by Brian Kelly of the current state of the ORCID project, and the work on the Technical Foundations (Talat Chaudhri) and ISKB (Thom Bunting) web sites, services and processes being developed by UKOLN staff.

The rest of the meeting was largely devoted to focussed discussions of the required nature and scope of the work packages that had been suggested in the actions from the discussions in the preceding half of the meeting, for which the group separated into two groups and then came back together to discuss and synthesise their findings.

In summary, Neil Jacobs reiterated the need to remain aware of milestones outside of this work, e.g. the REF outline in July 2011 and the final specification in January 2012, as well as JES milestones, in order to avoid being caught out by those developments.The meeting was happy with the provisional shape of the work packages recommended to the JISC for commissioning in order to inform the ongoing series of meetings. Josh Brown agreed to prepare a timeline, and that he, Neil Jacobs and David Flanders will report back at the next meeting once these actions have been carried out.

Finally, dates were agreed for the entire series of meetings. Very considerable progress was made during the meeting in a very short space of time, which was hard but rewarding work that proceeded from an initial position of quite general and all-encompassing discussions in the the area of research management and unique identifiers to a clear, scoped and planned series of provisional work packages and processes for their co-ordination with the ongoing meetings of the group.