Stephanie Hagemann-Wilholt
Since 2018 I am working at TIB in the department for PIDs and Metadata Services. There, we are leading the German DOI and ORCID consortia and are dedicated to the dissemination of PIDs and improvement of their metadata. We are committed to new PID types and to an elaborated use of existing PIDs, e.g. to support the German national research data infrastructure. Before I came to TIB, I worked for the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructure. This stakeholder committee focused on defining and improving the political conditions of research data management in Germany. As a trained historian in the history of economics and science I am still interested in historical issues.
Session
Amid debates about the credibility of academia - sparked by scandals involving fake conferences – we proposed creating an infrastructure to improve transparency around academic events. The aim was to establish a registry that records conferences, workshops, and similar formats using structured metadata and assigns DOIs, enabling clear identification, citation, linking, and long-term discoverability. The ConfIDent project launched in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when widespread cancellations, postponements, and rapid transitions to online meetings exposed weaknesses in existing event documentation. While these developments highlighted the need for reliable records that preserve event information as details change over time, early implementation revealed limitations in the chosen technical platform, including usability challenges, limited interoperability, and reliance on manual data entry, which slowed adoption. Drawing on these challenging lessons, but ongoing community support, we are now preparing a redesigned infrastructure to relaunch the registry sustainably.