It takes a village to communicate the value of PIDs

I joined DataCite to contribute to the FAIR-IMPACT project (and FAIRCORE4EOSC but that’s a topic for another blog). Today I’m happy to share with you some of our plans and progress made so far.

FAIR-IMPACT

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is the European initiative to implement a federated approach towards research data management. FAIR-IMPACT “Expanding FAIR Solutions across EOSC” is funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101057344. The project aims to realize an EOSC of FAIR data and services, by supporting the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services across scientific communities at an institutional, national and European level. The three years project is led by DANS and consists of 27 partner organizations.

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) and metadata are at the core of the FAIR principles, and DataCite is excited to be part of this collaborative effort to expand FAIR solutions. Building on the outcomes of past collaborations in the FREYA and FAIRsFAIR projects, one of our main contributions to FAIR-IMPACT will be to propose a shared long-term vision for PID service providers on PID usage in EOSC. Together with our project partners, we will foster dialogue and collaboration to establish a coordination mechanism for PID service providers to help them (and us!) implement services in EOSC. The discussion will cover PIDs for people, research outputs, organizations, software, instruments, and beyond. This project works in tandem with FAIRCORE4EOSC, which will build EOSC core components (and where DataCite is also a project partner). 

As a first step, to gather feedback from PID providers and other stakeholders we are hosting a hybrid session in this year’s EOSC Symposium: Towards a shared value proposition for Persistent Identifiers in EOSC (November 17th, 2022 13:30 – 15:00 CET). We kindly invite the PID community to participate and please contact me if you have any questions or would like to participate.

Reasons to join our efforts

At DataCite we believe collaboration is key to building a more open, robust and FAIR research infrastructure and that is also how we approach our task in the FAIR IMPACT project. Through years of collaboration with other stakeholders of our community, we know very well that it takes a village to communicate the value of persistent identifiers and metadata. That’s why we want to invite all PID and  open infrastructure providers to join us in the upcoming workshop(s) and help us find the best solutions within the project. We want to ensure that solutions provided through EOSC meet user needs, but that these are also aligned with existing practices. 

We are excited to continue our efforts and facilitate more collaboration between PID providers and the European EOSC community. Although there are already many national initiatives working on PID and FAIR implementation, this will be the first one at this scale on a regional level, with implementation reaching 27 (EU member) countries. And although EOSC is European in focus, it’s global in scope. Beyond that, the joint value proposition and project outcomes will provide good and valuable resources for all those looking to communicate and implement PIDs across the research ecosystem.  Join us in this community effort and register for the conversation!