2026-10-27 –, LUMC01
This Birds‑of‑a‑Feather session examines how persistent identifiers (PIDs), in particular people identifiers such as ORCID, can enhance trust, accountability, and interoperability in scholarly communication by enabling robust researcher identity verification.
As fraudulent submissions rise, STM’s Researcher Identity Verification Framework highlights the importance of proving both individual identity and academic participation, requiring a network of underlying PIDs, metadata, and linkages.
The discussion addresses how verified affiliations, academic contributions, and institutional identity providers can anchor scalable verification, linking researchers to their roles and outputs. A key theme is the propagation of trust signals across infrastructures like ORCID and Crossref, improving accountability and reducing fraud.
The session also acknowledges the need for anonymity or pseudonymity in legitimate contexts, emphasising a flexible PID ecosystem. Participants are invited to share challenges, including global inclusivity and early‑career researcher issues, with the aim of defining actionable steps for advancing PID‑enabled verification.
This Birds‑of‑a‑Feather session explores how persistent identifiers (PIDs) can strengthen trust, accountability, and interoperability in scholarly communication by supporting more robust researcher identity verification; an area increasingly critical as fraudulent submissions and identity manipulation continue to rise. STM's Researcher Identity Verification Framework emphasises that trust involves both proof of individual identity and evidence of academic participation, making PIDs uniquely powerful in producing reliable, reusable, and machine‑actionable signals of authenticity.
The discussion will focus on how ORCID and other person identifiers enriched with verified affiliations, contributions, and other trust markers can anchor scalable identity verification across publishers and platforms. Participants will also examine how institutional identity providers and institutional domain registries complement these person‑level PIDs, enabling more complete provenance chains that link researchers to their roles, outputs, and responsibilities.
A key theme is how verified information can propagate downstream - through metadata deposits and persistent connections across ORCID, Crossref, and other infrastructures - building an ecosystem where trust signals accumulate and become interoperable. By connecting authors, reviewers, submissions, and datasets through PIDs, publishers can strengthen accountability while reducing opportunities for fraudulent behaviour.
The session also recognises that persistence is not always the right default: legitimate scholarly activity often calls for anonymity or pseudonymity - including peer review and sensitive research contexts - and that a mature PID ecosystem must be able to accommodate these alongside verified, persistent identities rather than treating them as edge cases.
The session invites the PID community to share challenges and opportunities, including global inclusivity, early‑career researcher considerations, and emerging ideas such as verifiable credentials. The goal is to identify concrete next steps for advancing PID‑enabled verification across the ecosystem.
Hylke Koers is the Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, STM’s operational arm which develops and manages shared infrastructures and collaborative services to support the scholarly communications community. He is responsible for the STM Integrity Hub and serves as program director for GetFTR and SeamlessAccess. Before joining STM, Hylke worked in several senior technology and product management roles, in both private and public sector organizations, supporting the research community. He has held leading roles in FAIRsFAIR, the Research Data Alliance and served on the EOSC Architecture Working Group. Hylke holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Amsterdam.