2026-10-27 –, LUMC04
Persistent Identifiers for scholarly work have been around for more than 20 years and are quite crucial in enhancing the discoverability, credibility, and quality assurance of research out comes and their attribution. Persistence can be defined as the ability of an identifier to resist change over time. Where does this resilience to change come from, is it a function of the organisations that have stewardship of the PID or is it technology that underpins the identifier or is it something else?
If these are questions you have been asking yourself, this session is for you as we will be discussing what makes PIDs persistent and resilient to change.
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) provide for unambiguous identification of scholarly entities, such as researchers, journal articles, datasets, and organisations. By providing resilient references to such entities, they play a crucial role in research infrastructure by enabling unique identification over time which helps make research and scholarly outputs more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Persistent identifiers play a vital role in enhancing the discoverability, credibility and quality assurance of research outcomes and their attribution and are essential to modern research and open science.
What makes a persistent identifier resistant to change? Is it a feature of the identifier itself, is it the technology or are there other elements that make an identifier persistent? Is it possible to create identifiers for scholarly entities that currently lack them, and ensure those identifiers can be made persistent.
This is a Birds of Feather session that will interest attendees who want to find out what mechanism enables persistence in PIDs. However, it is the questions asked that truly matters and so the session will start with a brief introduction and move on to open discussion. Come along prepared to exchange knowledge and contribute to the discussion and leave with a fresh perspective on the persistence of PIDs.
Melroy currently works at the Australian Access Federation as Portfolio Manager - PIDs. He is a big fan of persistent identifiers and believes in their ability to enhance research and make it FAIR. The AAF also manages the Australian ORCID Consortium and as part of his day job Melroy interacts with consortium members to help them with their communication and implementation strategies and to realise benefits of their ORCID consortium membership. Melroy also collaborates with other like-minded individuals to further persistent identifiers and build a community of like-minded practitioners. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3522-7849