 Well, why don't we go ahead and get started? I'm Patricia Cruz, Jeff Bilder. We'll introduce ourselves again in a little minute. We're very excited to be here. This is a little bit of, I would dare to say, a kickoff meeting for us thinking about organizational identifiers and really moving this conversation forward and producing and implementing something downstream. So what we're going to do today is kind of hopefully set the stage for you all about what the future of organizational identifiers are. And then Jeff is going to have a flashback. And he's going to share with you some of his experience with CNI and hopefully put it in context and give you an idea of how we can move the idea of organizational identifiers forward. We're going to take a look at the problem statement for organizational identifiers and then look at some of what the community initiatives are that are out there. And then think a little bit about why, particularly Crossref and Orchid and Datasite are interested in this space and why we feel we're the people to move this forward. And then look about at why now and think about the work that has been done and share with this group about what's next. What is our path to move forward on organizational identifiers? And then comes the fun part where we're going to look at the requirements themselves that we've talked about, but really at a high level and then hopefully get some feedback from this group about what our thinking is, whether we're crazy or we're on target or not. Oh, hi, Laurie. So one of our presenters, Laurie, is right there. She is a, unfortunately, she sprained her ankle and is not able to join us today. But she's online on Jeff's phone and she'll be asking questions and listening to all of you as we move through the presentation. So I am going to hand it over. Oh, Jeff, you. So Jeff and I have not rehearsed this. So it's going to be a little bit of everything. Right, so well, we rehearsed it to the degree that we had to modify the slides in order to divide them amongst two people as opposed to three. But we promise that we'd introduce ourselves. I'm Jeffrey Builder. I'm the director of strategic initiatives at Crossref, which is a DOI registration agency. And Patricia is? I'm the executive director of Datasite. And Laurie is the director of ORCID. And you'll see that little Thor thing over there. Just I want to give you a really brief information about what Thor is and why it's there crowding our logos. And Thor is a project that's funded by the European Commission. It's a 30-month project where we're looking at the identifier community and thinking how we can integrate those identifiers across our platforms. Crossref is not officially a part of the project, but all of our organizations work very, very closely with each other. And so we feel like that is the best way that we can get a lot of return on our investment. So that's the Thor project in a nutshell. And speaking of the sort of the fact that we work together very closely, this is the time for the flashback. We work together so closely, in fact, that when ORCID was started, I was seconded from Crossref to ORCID as their interim CTO at the very beginning when they were just building it, when they were just proving it out. And the flashback is this. The last time I was at CNI was in fact when we were just building out ORCID. We were just prototyping it. We were just coming up with the concepts. And one of the things that we did that was very useful at the time was come to CNI, get feedback, and to get input from the community, from other stakeholders. Crossref, we have very good connections with publishers and some connections with researchers, but not so much the library and archiving community. So it was a tremendously useful exercise at the time. And what you see here was, I think, like three days earlier, we had just managed to get the first ORCID code to boot on a server locally. And it was kind of working. And you can see it had an unbelievably butt ugly interface and logo and stuff like that. But the good news is that since then, ORCID is a fantastic, thriving, and much better designed application. And it's really taken off. And it's just gratifying to see this latest bit of scholarly identifier infrastructure really take hold. Recently, as you've seen, they've passed the 2 million registered ORCIDs mark, which is a gigantic achievement. We just goes way beyond what we, at the very early days of ORCID, expected as far as uptake. And so it's really moving quickly. And likewise, I think the other thing that's just really taking off is data site. Right. And so for those of you that aren't familiar with data site, we're a nonprofit global organization. We have 30 members worldwide. And those members work with nearly 700 data centers. And to date, we've minted over 7.4 million DOIs, predominantly for data sets. But we also have a lot of text documents, et cetera. And over 6 million resolutions a month. So we're kind of the baby in this ORCID and cross-ref group. Sort of. She's just feeling intimidated by that, I think, which is. So we've been around a bit longer. We are also a nonprofit organization. And we assign DOIs primarily, historically, to things like journal articles and proceedings, but also to data sets and books and software and all sorts of other content. We've just blown by the 80 million registered DOI mark, which is fantastic. And but I think the really cool thing about all three of these efforts is that they are so now closely integrated. And this was always the vision from the start. But it's nice to see it start happening. If you're a researcher now and you have an ORCID and you go to one of the publishers who's supporting ORCID at Manuscript Submission, that ORCID will now travel with the metadata and get deposited either to data site or to cross-ref, depending on what the content is. And then data site or cross-ref will automatically update the ORCID profile of the researcher. So they don't have to think about this anymore. They don't have to worry about, oh my gosh, I've got to go and collect this information about my publications because a research assessment program is coming up and I have to go and scramble and find this out. The whole idea behind the establishment of ORCID and the integration of ORCID and data site and cross-ref was to ultimately save researchers' effort to enable them to not have to worry about collecting this information in their profiles. And this is just coming online and you're just beginning to see ORCID profiles getting updated automatically. And so this, we think, has been a victory. The feedback that we're getting from researchers on this functionality is tremendous. But clearly we're here and we're talking to you again. And that's indicative of the fact that we think that perhaps all is not right, that there's still something missing that will really build on the workflows and make the workflows for tracking research and assessment exercises a lot more efficient. But we still have a problem. And the problem as we see it and we sort of debated about how to talk about this is that we've got this stool. And if you notice, it's kind of missing a bit or possibly missing a bit. And that's one of the things that we're trying to explore. We certainly have two legs of the stool, which are really important. We have content identifiers that Datasight and Crossref are providing. And now we have contributor identifiers that ORCID is providing. And this alone sort of enables a ton of functionality. It means that an institution that knows that ORCIDs of its researchers can look in the Datasight or Crossref metadata to see when new content comes out with that ORCID attached to it. And if it comes out, they can download it and archive it and do all sorts of other things. It means that funders who know that they've given a grant to somebody with a particular ORCID can go in and see the research outputs that are being delivered from that funding trench. And these are all hugely useful things. But there's something that would really truly make this whole stool stand up and really function. And that's organization identifiers. To be able to have an institution say, I want to be able to reliably determine that what publications have come out with people affiliated with my institution so that I can track them. This would just enable a whole host of new applications and enable, we think, the entire community, publishers, institutions, funders, researchers to automate a lot of otherwise tedious workflow. And the question we have here is this. There are a lot of players in this space at the moment of one form or another. But I'm going to ask you a question. How many people in here think the organization identifier issue is a solved issue to the degree that content identifiers and ORCID identifiers are? Anybody think this is, my guess is that if you thought it was, you wouldn't be here. So it's a pretty easy, it was a pretty easy guess to make. So this is the problem, right? We kind of have maybe a wobbly leg, not quite the third leg of the stool that we need. And I don't think we're the only ones that think so. There have been a number of studies. We've commissioned internal studies or cells, but also some public ones, notably a just-casurate study that just talked about what a nightmare organizational identifiers are. Our own Martin Fenner has added to this occasionally. And I can just say that talking to the community, this is always a thing. It's like, when are we going to get this? I know that Cliff, sitting in the back, I've talked to him in the past about organizational identifiers and what a horrible, gnarly, and difficult problem it could be. But yet, here we are. There's a documented need for these things. And here are some critical aspects of it, right? Just like the identifiers that exist for content and for contributors, we want these systems to be comprehensive, open, and accessible, right? These are sort of some ground rules for identifiers that are going to be fundamental to the infrastructure of scholarly communication. Right, and I think, Jeff, one thing to note about this is the organizational identifier infrastructure doesn't only imply the technology. It implies the organization as well that supports that technology and the community. And this is something that we'll probably harp on until you're sick of it. But now, as we've noted, there's a lot of excellent work. There are people in this space, but there's this gap. And it's a gap that has just affected each of our organizations a lot. It's something that's constantly tripping us up. And so the big question you might be asking is why are we doing this? And I think there are a few reasons, but we all need them. And we need them in so many different use cases and so many different roles. And one of the complications, I think, that we have, and one of the reasons we're going out to the community, is to figure out which use cases and which particular areas we want to focus on. Because I think that the organizational identifier problem has a lot of characteristics that we experience with the researcher or the contributor ID problem, which is that when we started out and we talked about contributor IDs, everybody had an idea about why they were important. And all of those ideas focused on different kinds of use cases. So you had one group of people who was focusing on things having to do with authentication and authorization. And you had another group of people who was focusing on issues involved around discovery and things like that. And those use cases, some of them were really complicated and some of them were easier to deal with. And so one of the big things we had to do at the beginning of the ORCID process was determine in which of those problems are tractable, which ones were reasonable for us to try and deal with, and which ones would we either ignore or postpone. And that was one of the biggest. Making those decisions was one of the things that got us the most momentum in ORCID. But we have experiences. We need these. We have experience in the identifier space. Each of us, I think, represents a broad community of stakeholders. And clearly, each of these communities has different use cases. And we have to understand the full gamut of them. And this is a critical thing. At the moment, we're willing to take it on. I mean, we've just sat here and dithered about this for quite a long time. And I know, and I'll talk about this later, when we were working on ORCID, people would come up to us and say, why aren't you tackling the organizational identifier problem too? And we're like, holy, we're trying to deal with one big thing. It's way too complicated for us to do that. And besides, we thought at the time that there were other entities who looked like they were going to tackle it and maybe solve the problem. But that brings us to this point. One thing to really note is why we think that we're poised to work on this is that Crossref, Datasite, and ORCID, saying that we all represent different communities and we work globally. And scholarship is global. And I think Crossref works with publishers. We work with a lot of national libraries and data centers and ORCID working directly with researchers. You bring that whole package together, we really have a good idea about that broad stakeholder community. So I think that's really important to note. Yeah, and I'll build on that. We talk a little bit about it later as well. But one of the anti-patterns that we keep trying to sort of get beyond is the idea that scholarly infrastructure is country focused or institution focused or discipline focused. Increasingly research is international. It always transcends institutions. Almost everybody is collaborating with people outside of their institution. And so any kind of infrastructure that we build has to accommodate that. It can't be an infrastructure for physicists in the US. And all of our organizations have really taken that to heart. We built systems that we want to work globally across disciplines and across institutions, which brings us to why now the community really is keeps coming to us and saying, you've got to do something. We think we have a good understanding of the requirements. And again, I think that this depends on the use cases. There are some requirements that are quite fuzzy, but there are others where I think we have a much better sense. So for instance, just so that I don't sound like I'm being coy, just as with ORCID you might have authentication issues and discovery issues, you have something similar with organizational identifiers. You could have an authentication focused view of organizational identifiers, or you could have a discovery focused view of organizational identifiers. And as I'll illustrate later on, those two don't necessarily match. You're still using identifiers. You're talking about organizations. But there can be some disconnects there. And those are some of the things that we want to explore. Do you have any? Yeah. So what's been done so far, we three, besides getting together and saying, we've got to do something, we've been doing a lot of background research looking at past reports that have analyzed the identifier structure, trying to itemize the use cases and requirements from those, and build some of these things. We're going to point you a little later on to a document where we've been collecting some of these things and we're going to encourage you to add observations and things like that. And we've developed a long list of requirements. And again, I'm going to emphasize that it's a long list, right? Because part of the reason, I think, that a lot of people have been reluctant to tackle this is that they get that long list of requirements and they think, if we don't solve them all, we can't do it. And we actually, at the moment, think that there are probably parts that can be carved off and done sooner and then other bits that may need to be postponed and other bits that really are so gnarly that maybe they're things that we don't want to even touch. And this brings us to what next. We want to expand the list of use cases. And again, this is why we're coming to you. And then we want to go and prioritize the requirements. What do we think we can do? What do we think is a tractable problem in the shorter term? And then, and this is the process that we're through. This is the first of at least two meetings that we have scheduled now to talk about the issue with the community. The next one is actually going to be a workshop at Forest 2016 in Portland. And if anybody's going to be at that, we encourage you to be there. We're really going to try and hash through some of the things that we gather here and that we gather between now and then. And then we're going to create some groups to explore some of the particular issues that we identify within that. And we're really hoping that we have a pretty clear direction of where we want to go in the fall. And again, based on our experience setting up other things like orchid and stuff like that, this seems like a reasonable schedule to us. But we'll see. We'll see what kind of feedback we get. What's happening today? Well, we'd like to point you at this list of requirements that we've put together up here. We'll make these slides available. If you can get down to this short URL, you can see the list as we have it at the moment. We'd love to discuss some of the issues that we've come up with and get your feedback on that and then also incorporate that into the document. Yeah, and part of that is also supplying your use cases and sharing with us some of those things so we can make sure that our requirements are on the right track with that. And which brings us to this. And one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to break down the requirements that we consider to be primarily organizational and those that are more technical. And again, Patricia alluded to this at the very beginning, one of the things that concerns us all in this space is if we are planning on building infrastructure, we think that that infrastructure has to be governed and has to be organized in a way, it's not just about technology, it's about an organization that keeps running this technology that's sustainable, that's accountable and that people are ultimately going to trust. And this is a very big issue. Trust is, we have this sort of reflexive and understandable worry whenever we see a big chunk of critical infrastructure get centralized. Because clearly that could be a single point of failure. It could, we've had experiences of organizations that have started out as community organizations and then have sort of parted ways of the community and gone their own way and become unaccountable and unreachable and unungovernable. So a lot of people have some very big concerns about what an organization that's gonna be responsible for so much infrastructure is gonna look like. And this again is something that we encountered in the very, very early days of working. And one of the first things we did, and I seriously was the first thing the board did, is they had to adopt some principles that governed the operation of the Orchid Board and the Orchid Organization. And this was the first thing they did when the board was formed was pass these principles. And we have at least, I think, one ex Orchid Board member in the audience back there. I saw Craig come in. So he remembers this. This was a really important point in Orchid's history because once we adopted these 10 principles which committed the organization to be sort of open and transparent and that the data was gonna be open and that the business models were not going to be based on and closing the data, that had a profound effect on how people perceive the organization, whether or not they were likely to trust it with such vital institutional or infrastructural role. And so I, since the drafting of those principles, I've been working with some other colleagues. You may know Cameron Nailin and Jennifer Lynn and we've been spending a lot of time talking about what the characteristics need to be and these are aspirational. I have to, I will add very quickly that I don't think Orchid meets them yet. I don't think Datasite meets them yet. I don't think Crossref meets them yet. But we've come up with a set of aspirational sort of description of what needs to happen with an organization for it to be a trusted, trustworthy, sorry, infrastructure in scholarly communication. And those things that we talk about cover things like coverage, like for instance, I mentioned that infrastructure ideally transcends disciplines, nations, institutions and things like that. Governments, that is who is the organization open to? How is it actually operated? Is it for profit, not for profit? Which gets us to sustainability because clearly if we're running infrastructure it would be very irritating if that infrastructure disappeared on grand cycles. I mean imagine if lights and plumbing were funded on a grand cycle and every time you ran out of money your lights went out. That would be a pretty frustrating infrastructure to deal with. So we're very concerned about sustainability. And lastly we're talking off a lot about the insurance. That is how if all else goes wrong how can you still feel some know that you're gonna be able to at least extract yourself from the system. And so there are all sorts of governance issues and we don't wanna go into them in huge detail there but if you wanna say the kinds of stuff we're talking about and thinking about there's this article that we wrote which was grounded very much on our experience in running things like Crossref and Founding Orchid and DataSite. And I think it's pretty important in our conception of any solution to this problem of organizational identifiers as well. And this brings us to the technical thing which is what most people focus on immediately when they're thinking about infrastructure. And as I sort of alluded to earlier when we were dealing with orchid in the early days we had a lot of people come up to us and say but aren't organizational identifiers easier than identifiers for people? And I've got a cute laughter, right? Because anybody who thinks about it for three seconds realizes that organizations have all sorts of irritating habits like they do things like merge and split and have aliases and die and are reborn and people, identifiers, that's difficult but I don't know of any person who has sub-people. And I haven't seen a reborn person yet. And so, I mean the problem's really associated with what I'm trying to establish is we're not naive about this, right? We know that this is a bigger problem and it has some complications that are quite different to the ones having to do with contributor items. And this gets us to perspective, you know? The rose-tinted glasses view of organizational identifiers is this should be easy, right? Harvard University, clearly this is something that nobody is gonna doubt. Everybody has the same view, this is Harvard University. But of course, that depends. Are you looking at from the point of view with subscription glasses on, right? Where you might actually be talking about your relationship with a library at Harvard. Or even more specifically, IP ranges for subscriptions, right? And if you're looking at it with membership glasses on, yeah, it might be Harvard University. But go off and look up Harvard University to legal entity, you know? And it's presidents and fellows of Harvard College. Now imagine for a second that you're trying to populate a list that was designed to allow a researcher to pick their affiliation and you put that up, right? That wouldn't work too well. So it's really important for us to figure out which of these sort of perspectives we want. And then affiliation might be something as far more precise. And so, you know, I think one of the things that we're exploring here is that all of those perspectives, all of those different views of what an organization are, are clearly all important. And some of them are just unbelievable rats nests. And some of them are probably a little easier to do. But even doing the easier ones might make the rats nests ones easier to do in the longer term. And I know, again, this is, because I've had brief conversations with Cliff about this in the past and particularly talking about things like subscriptions and IP ranges and so on and so forth. We know this is a big issue, right? But we also know that this is a horribly messy issue. And so one of the things we're trying to decide is we look at all these use cases which things can we take off and do more easily and which ones are harder. And maybe there are harder things that we don't want to touch but that we want to at least enable somebody else to do it more easily, right? So you can make an argument that even if we attached, decided to focus our energy on, you know, organizations from an affiliation point of view, right? That that might ultimately make somebody's life easier if they were trying to account for organizations from a subscription point of view. And again, this is all the kind of stuff that we're sort of churning through, trying to understand, trying to get a picture of. But I'll say upfront that I think a lot of the driver for all of us focusing on this issue now has a lot to do with affiliations, right? And in turn, the driver for that is a changing environment in research where it is becoming increasingly important for funders, for institutions, for researchers to keep track of all of their research outputs in a comprehensive way, a systemic way. And that this is occurring at an industrial scale now. Whereas before you might have had to put together a list of your publications when you were up for promotion or tenure, now you have to do it every X years. And it has to be complete. And it has to be, you know, and everybody, not just everybody in this institution has to do it, but everybody in every institution in a country has to do it at the same time. And so the old mechanisms, whereby you could just write a note to somebody and say, could you send me an acceptance, a letter confirming that you've accepted my paper and such and such, those don't scale anymore for this kind of stuff. And we know that institutions are struggling trying to keep track of this information and they have to keep track of it. We know that funders are struggling to do this. And we know that publishers want to be able to make it easier for their researchers to provide this information. And so at the moment, you know, one of the sweet spots that we're looking at that where we think we could provide, you know, a great deal of value for a subset of the organizational identifier problem, overall problem, is affiliation. But again, that's a working hypothesis and that's why we're here and that's why we're talking to people. It's no whether we can usefully hide that part off and focus on it in a way that makes sense and that's useful in the short term. So, you know, again, I think one of the big messages we want to get across is that this is a group effort. We all have skin in this game. We all need to solve the problem. And so we're collaborating in a way that's even more sort of, you know, more intensive than we have even in the past because we think that this is a big enough problem that it's gonna take all of our efforts to really solve it and to reach all the communities that matter. And we're at that stage that I was at when I came to CNI the last time talking about ORCID where we're trying to get more community input so that we're pretty sure that we understand the problem and so that we can move forward. So again, I think there are two places where you can provide immediate feedback. One is if anybody's gonna be involved in 416, we encourage you to come to this session where we're gonna be talking about a lot of the stuff we think in a lot more detail. And then also look at this draft that we've put together which is sort of a, as we say it's a long list. It's a mix of things. We struggled with should we release this now or should we fix it up and make it lovely and organized and neat and we decided to get it out there as early as possible so that we can start getting feedback and we'll neat it up and organize it as we go. And then lastly, of course, you can get in touch with any of us if you have ideas about this or if you wanna talk about particular use cases that you think are being ignored or not being talked about, you can address all of us immediately. And then lastly, because, and I know that I hope, I hope Lori's still there, she's still there. Lori was concerned that we might not leave room for us to get feedback and so I'm happy to say that we've actually got quite a bit of time for us to get people to get people's feedback on what kinds of issues they'd like to see and to test our ideas about affiliation data versus subscription data and things like that. So I think, yes, the floor's open. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thanks everybody.