2026-10-29 –, LUMC02
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.
Amid a heated public debate on trust in science - sparked by scandals involving fake journals and conferences – we submitted a funding proposal in 2018 to help address these concerns by building a reliable infrastructure. Our aim was to create a registry for academic events that would provide permanent access to metadata for conferences, workshops, and other scholarly formats. By assigning DOIs, these events would become clearly identifiable, citable, linkable, and easily discoverable.
Even before the public debate emerged, a working group had formed with representatives from scientific publishers, PID providers, and infrastructure organizations. The group developed a draft metadata schema for describing academic events and minting DOIs. We actively contributed to this effort and, in light of the scandals, advocated for establishing a trusted event registry built on persistent identifiers and high-quality metadata to strengthen transparency and trust in the scholarly ecosystem.
The resulting project, ConfIDent, started in 2020, when in parallel the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to academic events: Conferences were canceled, postponed, or rapidly moved online. These shifts exposed gaps in existing event documentation and directly informed our metadata design. It highlights the urgency of systematically documenting academic events so that these information remain findable, distinguishable, and transparent over time, when crucial metadata for identification as time and location change.
As the technical foundation for our registry, we initially selected a software solution already in use for other projects at our organization. It promised to combine reliable documentation with an open wiki approach, allowing conference communities to contribute metadata early in the event lifecycle. However, during implementation, we discovered that the platform lacked key components for our needs, suffered from limited usability, and required specialized development expertise that was difficult to find.
Interoperability was initially limited, and our reliance on manual data entry slowed database growth, hindered community adoption, and delayed overall project progress—challenges that persisted until the initial funding period ended. As a result, the registry and its services had not yet reached the maturity needed to secure additional funding. We had reached a critical juncture, having invested substantial resources without yet achieving the maturity required for the service to develop sustainably.
Despite the prolonged pause in technical development, we remained committed to the development of ConfIDent, maintaining close contact with communities that emphasized the registry’s value for the scholarly infrastructure landscape and kept us motivated. Building on these insights, lessons learned from previous setbacks, and the expertise of our now highly experienced data curation team, we are preparing a technical relaunch.
Version 2 will deliver a more robust technical infrastructure, addressing interoperability and usability challenges while fostering community engagement to ensure the service is accessible, relevant, and sustainable within the scholarly ecosystem. Although the use of DOIs for academic events is not yet widespread, it offers significant benefits to the research community and requires continued commitment, supported by reliable infrastructure, to achieve broad-scale adoption.
After working in several academic libraries in a wide range of positions, I started to coordinate the TIB's VIVO activities as a member of the Open Science Lab in 2016. Since then I participated in diverse activities and projects around open research information, persistent identifiers (PIDs), linked (open) data, open science, and the open source research information system VIVO. I'm leading the Lab Group Open Research Information that was founded in 2020.
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.