John Aspler
John Aspler graduated from McGill University with a PhD in Neuroscience. Although originally interested in music cognition, his exposure to a stream of problematic neuroscience-related news publications both cultivated and cemented in him an interest in improving public scientific literacy. John pursued his research at McGill University and the Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit, where he worked on several projects about the media discourse surrounding people with neurodevelopmental disabilities (e.g., fetal alcohol spectrum disorder). He is also Manager, Canadian Persistent Identifier Community / Gestionnaire, Communauté canadienne des identifiants pérennes at CRKN-RCDR.
Sessions
DataCite consortia provide access to DataCite services to organizations within their region or subject-based interest group. DataCite Consortium Leads have a lot of leeway to determine how consortia operate. What kinds of organizations are eligible to participate? How is the consortium funded? What kind of support does the consortium lead provide and how? In this Birds of a Feather session, representatives from existing or prospective Consortium Lead organizations will compare notes on how they think about these and any other questions of consortium management. Participants will have space to discuss any tricky problems they face, share success stories, and understand how DataCite consortia vary around the world. DataCite strives to foster venues for consortia to engage with each other, and this session will provide an important opportunity for consortium leads to share their points of view and strengthen a community of practice in person.
What are the catalysts for membership growth in PID communities? Are you engaging with a new or emerging group of stakeholders that are still learning about PIDs? Speakers from Canada and the United States will discuss how national government policies on research integrity and security, organizational Open Access initiatives, and other open science efforts have provided opportunities to expand PID community engagement and adoption from early adopters (like libraries and publishers) to new stakeholders learning about PIDs (like research administrators and funders). After a brief presentation, participants in this session will engage in small group discussion to identify opportunities to increase PID awareness and adoption, and share ideas on engaging new stakeholders. The session will conclude with collective reflections, offering practical insights into promoting PID adoption and strengthening global research communities.
Should publishers of research outputs, awards, and other entities register DOIs with DataCite or Crossref? These registration agencies have their roots in different use cases for different entities - Crossref for journal publications, DataCite for datasets - but their capabilities and focuses increasingly overlap. Today, DataCite and Crossref both: operate globally, support identifying and describing a wide variety of resources (journals/articles, books/chapters, datasets, dissertations, grants/awards, peer reviews, preprints, reports, and standards), and support connection metadata to other kinds of PIDs. As communities develop National PID Strategies, it is becoming difficult to differentiate between DataCite and Crossref; what kind of grounded advice can strategies offer their communities? In this BoF session, you will be invited to present your perspective on this question, contribute to a shared international conversation about registering DOIs, and provide feedback about how DataCite and Crossref might distinguish themselves from one another.
The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD), a PID for Projects, was originally developed in Australia; other countries are now also beginning to implement and test national and regional RAiD services concretely: Canada, the Netherlands, and the US. This panel will provide updates from these three pilots, led by SURF in the Netherlands, Lyrasis and the San Diego Supercomputer Center in the United States, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and Canadian Research Knowledge Network in Canada. Panelists will share the current status of their RAiD pilots, including an overview of stakeholders involved, prominent use cases or workflows of focus, and plans for next steps.
This workshop will help develop the PID matrix created for the Canadian PID strategy into a tool that can be used by the PID community globally. After a brief history of why and how the matrix was developed, and an overview of the current version, the presenters will use interactive tools to ask participants to share their thoughts on the core elements, and on any new categories or elements needed. The rest of the workshop will be spent brainstorming next steps for the matrix, through a series of exercises.
PIDs connect everything together, which requires significant collaboration across all research sectors and stakeholders. Ultimately, local resources and policies are required for a collaborative response to PIDs, which typically takes place at the regional or national levels - even though PIDs are essentially international endeavors. Without these national approaches, PIDs remain difficult to implement and scattershot in their adoption. As countries continue to develop and implement National PID Strategies at varying speeds and with varying levels of sophistication and community buy-in, this session offers a timely opportunity to reassess the global landscape and reflect on collective progress. There are many drivers of PID adoption and implementation globally - from the integration of PIDs into funder systems to the availability of resources in a given language, as just a couple of endless possible examples. Each national strategy approaches drivers differently, depending on their context and resources - how does your region approach PIDs?
In this presentation, you will be introduced to the concept of Persistent Identifier (PID) graph and how PIDs can provide a reliable means of presenting, analysing, and understanding research activity. Relationships between PIDs like ORCID, DOI, ROR etc offer important information about researchers, their works and their collaborations. Understanding how these identifiers connect and relate to one another, you will gain a clearer view of collaboration patterns as reflected by scholarly publications. Using a publicly available script, the presentation will also demonstrate how data derived from institutional publication records can be used to collect and visualise collaboration data. Through animated visualisations you will be able to see how researchers collaborate across national and international borders.
PIDs are increasingly important for repository workflows. Primary challenges for PID integration into open-source repository platforms include the ability to coordinate many moving pieces globally and identifying who might be responsible for moving any given development forward. In this session, you will learn how PIDs can be used in repository platforms, and a case study example for how PID advocacy work is moving forward for DSpace, an open source, community-driven repository software used by thousands of organizations across the globe.