RDA National PID Strategies Guide and Checklist

National PID Strategies WG

Group co-chairs: Christopher Brown, Natasha Simons, Daniel Bangert, Shawna Sadler

Recommendation Title: RDA National PID Strategies Guide and Checklist

Authors: Natasha Simons, Christopher Brown, Daniel Bangert, Shawna Sadler

Impact:

The RDA National PID Strategies WG has produced a comparison guide and checklist that can be used when developing a national PID strategy. This is supported by the nine case studies collected from countries at different stages of developing a national PID strategy. The countries are Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

The guide offers a comparison of the nine case studies, including scope, drivers, strategy development, key features and priority PIDs. The checklist can be used as a starting point for developing your national PID strategy. You do not need to complete all of the numbered points or follow the order. The checklist is designed to be used flexibly to help you think about what is needed.

The Guide, Case Studies and Checklist can be used to:

Inform the development of your national PID strategy
Develop a roadmap to accompany your strategy
Align with international initiatives in this important area
Facilitate stakeholder engagement with national PID strategies

Connect, communicate and collaborate with others developing national PID strategies

Recommendation package DOI: 10.15497/rda/00091

Citation: Simons, N., Brown, C., Bangert, D., & Sadler, S. (2023). National PID Strategies Guide and Checklist (Version 1.0). Research Data Alliance. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA/00091

Abstract

The National PID Strategies Working Group was endorsed to explore how Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) form part of national policy and research infrastructure implementation frameworks. The Group recognises that there are systemic and network benefits from widespread and consistent PID adoption including financial and time savings benefits. Research sector stakeholders including funders, government agencies, and national research communities have created PID consortia or policies (including mandates) in pursuit of these benefits. At the establishment of the WG, National PID Strategies were beginning to emerge in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada as a pathway to realising these benefits and an international conversation felt needed. RDA provided an umbrella for discussion and alignment between the strategies, refinement of the value proposition and sharing practical development pathways to a national PID strategy.

The findings of the 18 months of the WG have been that:

National PID strategies are on the rise, evidenced in the case studies collected by the WG and the growing momentum of discussions at RDA Plenaries and other international fora.
The development of national PID strategies is a relatively new phenomenon and many countries are in the very early stages. In fact, many have more of a national approach that they are seeking to transform into a strategy.
All national PID strategies are currently in development and therefore subject to a high degree of change. During the course of the WG, nine case studies were collected and several of these needed to be updated prior to the Group’s final output due to changes that had taken place in those countries.
There is no single ‘cookie cutter’ approach to developing a national PID strategy. Critical components include:
- A clear value proposition with use cases
- A group or organisation that is responsible for driving strategy development
- An open, inclusive, iterative process that involves all stakeholders
- An accompanying roadmap that outlines practical steps for implementation
International PID providers such as ORCID and DataCite have begun to actively engage with national PID strategies and the RDA National PID Strategies WG provides a focal point for furthering this engagement.

An ambitious goal of the WG was to map common activities and produce a guide to help others - irrespective of geographical region - to follow a ‘blueprint’ to define their national PID strategy. However, given the findings listed above, a ‘blueprint Guide’ to national PID strategies is not possible at this stage. Instead, we provide a Guide that compares and contrasts national PID strategies based on nine case studies we have collected. An accompanying Checklist is also included to summarise and highlight key considerations.

UN Sustainable Development Goals

The Recommendations contribute to Goal 9 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.

DOI:

10.15497/rda/00091

Output Status:

RDA Endorsed Recommendations

Review period start:

Monday, 12 June, 2023 to Wednesday, 12 July, 2023

Group content visibility:

Use group defaults

Primary WG Focus / Output focus:

Data Management

Identity, Store, and Preserve

Disseminate, Link, and Find

Policy, Legal Compliance, and Capacity

Domain Agnostic:

Domain Agnostic

File:

Attachment	Size
AUSTRALIA Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	108.6 KB
CANADA Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	87.38 KB
CZECH REPUBLIC Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	108.51 KB
FINLAND Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	89.72 KB
KOREA Case Study - National PID Strategies.docx.pdf	67.42 KB
NETHERLANDS Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	83.56 KB
GERMANY Case Study - National PID Strategies.docx.pdf	95.54 KB
NEW ZEALAND Case Study - National PID Strategies.docx.pdf	86.69 KB
UNITED KINGDOM Case Study - National PID Strategies.pdf	151.76 KB
GUIDE and CHECKLIST_ Pathways to National PID Strategies (RDA WG Output) FINAL.pdf	195.74 KB
National-PID-Strategies-Checklist Visual.pdf	5.71 MB
National-PID-strategies-white-paper.pdf	5.22 MB

Attachment	Size
RDA National PID Strategies WG Outputs Card.pdf	4.36 MB

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4122 reads

Author: Ryan O'Connor

Date: 12 Jul, 2023
Dear co-chairs,

Thank you for putting this document together. I have a few points of feedback, some on the overall format and some on the content:

There is some repetition of Key findings and Key messages at start of report. The ‘Introduction to the Guide’ could be shortened to alleviate this.

In the ‘Lead organisation’ section, insight into how an organisation comes to be in this position would be of use if it is available; similarly, any info on how coordination takes place in situations where there are a number of lead organisations would be good. There is some info in the individual case studies, but ‘key messages’ or similar would be of use.

Would it be possible to include key contacts for individual case studies where readers/Guide users want to learn more about situation in countries similar to their own? In the ‘Summary’ section it notes that the Guide can be used to “Connect, communicate and collaborate with others developing National PID Strategies.” “Creators” are listed at the top of each, but it’s not clear whether/how they can be contacted about their country’s situation.

The Guide and case studies focus exclusively on high-income countries. I would expect to see some explanation for this or for why lower income countries weren’t surveyed. It may be the case that lower income countries are at the point where there is low levels of coordination around national PID strategies, but some justification is needed here I think.

The Case Studies table needs to be updated. Also, a blank Case Study template would be useful to see, either as an Appendix or separate document.

The first section of the Checklist should be divided into two as it contains two separate questions, one on the value proposition and the other on stakeholders, both of which were looked at separately in the main body of the document. It would be possible to merge the focus on stakeholders into the second section.

Overall, this feels to me more like a Supporting Output than a WG Recommendation. To be considered a Recommendation, this would maybe include something on how to operationalise or implement the stages set out in the Guide section; in the present state it feels like more like a summary of findings from the case studies.

If I need to clarify any of the above please let me know. Apologies for getting this to you so close to the end of the review period.

Ryan

Author: Carlos Norberto...

Date: 24 Jul, 2023

Dear co-chairs

I agree with Ryan's comments.

especially due to the lack of survey of initiatives from the global south.

I am aware of initiatives in Argentina.

In fact I am part of it:

http://id.caicyt.gov.ar/ayuda.php

In Brazil and Iran there are also initiatives.

All the best

Carlos Authier

Author: Natasha Simons

Date: 25 Aug, 2023

We were pleased to see over 1700 views of our WG outputs during community review. Thank you to Ryan and Carlos for their comments. Our responses are as follows:

1. Regarding the countries included in the case studies, we have addressed this by adding a ‘method’ section under the ‘case studies’ heading in the Guide as follows:

Method

Submissions of case studies were requested through an open call for anyone to submit using the template developed by co-chairs and reviewed, adjusted and approved at WG meetings. The open call for case studies submission was made repeatedly throughout the duration of the Working Group via email to the WG members list, at RDA Plenary WG sessions and at WG meetings held between plenaries. Disappointingly, some presentations given at WG meetings or Plenary sessions were not subsequently received as case studies and could not be included in this Guide. Other than completing the template, there were no eligibility criteria for submitting a case study and no case studies were modified or rejected by co-chairs or the WG. The case study template has been included in this Guide.

Note: we welcome additional case studies from anyone in any country or region to be submitted to the recently established National PID Strategies IG, who will be responsible for care and further development of this Guide and Checklist.

2. We are comfortable with some repetition in the introductory section. The ‘key messages’ are there to draw in someone who is after a quick read of the main points.

3. We will take Ryan’s suggestion on the ‘lead organisation’ into the National PID Strategies IG for further discussion as we have not collected this information to date and therefore can’t include it in this output.

4. We deliberately did not include contact details of case studies submitters as we believe that would be a breach of privacy laws. Instead, we asked for ORCID identifiers and we trust they are sufficient to find current contact details, should readers wish to do so.

5. We have removed the table with missing links as the case studies will be uploaded alongside the Guide and will be accessible via the same landing page.

6. We have included a the (blank) case study template in the Guide as per the suggestion from Ryan.

7. The Checklist was developed by the WG at a Plenary meeting and we do not wish to change the style of the Checklist that our members have agreed to.

Thanks,

Co-chairs