 Hello everyone. My name is Veronique Kirmer. I'm director of author and reviewer services at Nature Publishing Group. I'm sorry I cannot be with you in person today, but I'm very grateful and I'd like to thank the organizers for the opportunity to present our perspective at Nature Publishing Group with regard to our kids and how we have looked at integration of our kids in our publishing platform. I also want to say that I currently serve on the board of director of our kids and therefore you will not be surprised to hear that my view is one of a strong supporter of our kids, but I hope to convince you that it's actually for the right reasons and that our kids is really a very important added value to the scientific community in general. I've been asked to tell you about the integration specifically of our kids at Nature Publishing Group and I'd like to start by sort of looking at what are the benefits for publishers of using persistent unique identifiers of the type that our kid provides. I think it's quite obvious, right? There is a clear alignment of purpose in what our kid is trying to do which is connecting research and researchers and what publishers are trying to do. Obviously there are internal benefits as well and these are common with other organizations, pretty much any organizations that adopt these persistent unique identifiers. It's really that it allows you to integrate multiple internal systems, multiple internal databases and really to disambiguate user accounts between these systems and the contributions that different users make to different parts of the organization. So that's an internal benefit and it's one that is not unique to publishers. I think more importantly what is unique to publishers and very important for them is the fact that there are very strong external benefits. Obviously attribution is a core function of what publishers do. We do it to provide proper credit and to provide accountability for the content we publish. This is a question that is really helped by the existence of persistent unique identifiers. It's also something that allows us to provide a persistent association of the authors with their published work. At the moment, authors are obviously mobile, they move institutes, they change affiliation, some of them change their name in the course of their career and a paper that you publish today with another named in a certain way and with a certain affiliation, you might lose that association in two years time. And this is a problem for which we don't have a solution at the moment but where persistent unique identifiers can really help. It's also important for something that we're trying to do more and more which is to enrich our content by linking it to additional content elsewhere. And that might be, for example, datasets that are found in data repositories, it might be related papers, it might be protocols and methods. And doing so not only by linking pieces of content but by also linking individuals and indicating their contribution is very important because it allows us to do this with proper attribution and really differentiate the different kinds of contributions in a paper which is very important. Having a good disambiguation of authors would also allow a better search functionality on our website and finally something we're exploring as well is using these persistent identifiers to try to provide more credit to reviewers. Obviously, we're very grateful to the work that reviewers are doing for publishers but at the moment, at least in our system, this happens very much behind the scenes and this is something that we'd like to acknowledge the role of reviewers more and we're looking at persistent identifiers to help us with that. I'm going to explore these different elements in a little bit more detail in a moment but I think an important question that we might want to start by asking we've been talking about persistent unique identifiers and the question is why orchids? Why is orchids the solution? I think that to me what's very, very important about orchid is that it's really a truly interoperable system across the industry as it's really broadly defined. When I call it the industry, I don't just mean the publishing industry, it's really the research industry and orchid is really establishing itself as not as a unique specific entity but as a bridge between existing systems, a bridge between existing identifiers and it's really in this representation, you see it at the center of this circle helping and playing a facilitator role. We're seeing that the interactions between orchid and other partners in the research enterprise such as funders and societies, data repositories, universities and also other systems of identifiers is actually very, very important. It's also an organization that has principles that are very dear to us. They're open principles. It's a non-for-profit organization. It has made the promise of being always free of charge to researchers and so I think these are principles that we hold very dear and that we feel are really aligned with the kind of service we want to offer. I think this has been confirmed in a way by the fact that orchid has really seen a very rapid growth curve of adoption. Since the launch of orchid in October 2012, we now have more than 1.25 million orchid identifiers in the registry and this has been unprecedented in the area of identifiers in the research community. I think that these are all things that speak in favor of orchid as being really the identifier solution and I think it's really... If you want to see it in another way, the way I like to think about it is basically orchid is about plumbing. It's not an entity in itself. It's about plumbing between all these different entities that make up and are stakeholders in the research enterprise. It's been very well adopted by many of the big publishers and that's very important because it's important that we have something that is interoperable between publishers but more importantly, it's really linking these publishers to the rest of the enterprise. It's linking them to funding agencies. We've seen big players such as the National Institute of Health in the US, the Wellcome Trust, the European Commission in the context of their Horizon 2020 program that are really encouraging and promoting the use of orchids in grant applications at the very early stages of research. That's very important. Even earlier, we've seen universities were starting to adopt orchids. In the ideal system, what you want is for a researcher very early in their careers while they're still students to basically register for an orchid and continue using this orchid throughout their career having that orchid follow them and capture all their contributions including the things they do later on through societies and research organizations including their contributions in terms of data to repositories finally to the publishing landscape. All these elements that are very important and where orchid is really providing a good solution. This speaks to the growth curve that I was telling you about. It's been a very steady and consistent growth and we see adoption of orchids continuing to increase and obviously the more players, the more members are actually integrating orchids in their systems the more researchers become aware of orchids, their encounter, the possibility to use orchids in their scientific life. This is going to continue to drive registration of orchids. So we're really in a system where both the organizations that are adopting an integrating orchid in their systems and the research community are both contributing to making that registry the largest possible registry of researchers in the world. On to our integration at Nature Publishing Group so it basically starts with manuscript submission. We're using e-journal press system as a manuscript tracking system and we've integrated in the registration process at submission the capability for a user to either attach an orchid that they already have or to quickly create an orchid at that submission stage. Importantly the orchid there is validated by the user via the OAuth system that orchid provides and therefore we have a very strong association and a validated orchid associated with a user account in our manuscript tracking system. This orchid follows the manuscript route through production, goes to our typesetters. Eventually we have an XML file with the orchids which is sent to the typesetters who add them in the article XML and so at publication the orchid is part of the published paper of the XML and we also send orchids to third-party indexers such as Crossref. So the integration is really from the submission of the manuscript to its publication and indexing. At submission this is how it looks like. You see on the top of the page the question about creating or linking an orchid. As I said, it's very important that this relationship is authenticated so we really have a relationship that is ascertained. We also ask in this process for Nature Publishing Group to be set as a trusted party by the individual which allows us to read from their orchid record and eventually even write on their orchid record. The orchid information is used to pre-populate the information so it's really trying to also make the system easier for authors and facilitating submission. Orchid becomes associated with that user account. Upon publication here is how it looks like. So if you click on an author name who has provided an orchid during the consideration of the manuscript we are linking to the orchid account, the article page. So you really have now a very strong association between the article and its author via these persistent identifiers and the article, be it the orchid and the DOI. So this is what the current integration looks like. This is what we have at the moment. We are asking for orchids early in the submission process. Through the submission process we are asking for other persistent identifiers. For example, the Fundref codes which characterize the funding agency that has provided support for the study and eventually when the manuscript is published it has a unique identifier as the manuscript, which is the DOI. It has a collection of orchids' IDs that are associated with it. We sent all this information to Crossref and this is where we are now. We're also working with Crossref and with other publishers to go one step further and basically complete the loop by updating the orchid record of that researcher with the recent publication. That's very important because I think it's a service to authors. They don't need to remember to go and update their profiles. I think it's something that university administrators appreciate a lot. We see that as a good service and it's also important because now we're starting to create in the orchid record assertions that are really third-party assertions. So they are an association with the orchid record that are verified by a third-party in this case by the publisher. Hoping that we're actually quite close to being able to do that. We're not there yet, but we're working very strongly on that. I think as we're doing this and we're doing this with more and more unique identifiers, we're basically growing that ecosystem of unique identifiers and of metadata that is associated with the paper. We're basically able to connect more things. When I say things, it's all these things that have a unique identifier. For example, the source of funding, the fund draft, it's the paper via the DOI, obviously the researcher via the orchid. Within the paper, you now start to have a bit more granularity. Some publishers provide sub-DOIs for individual figures, for example. Again, this is a unique identifier. We in particular have close relationships to data repositories where we basically mandate that the authors submit their data and post their data in these open repositories and we include the accession number, which serves as a unique identifier in the paper. We really have now more and more of an ecosystem where we really have all these different pieces of information that are really clearly identified and, importantly, that can start acting as metadata. They can start being queried by system, including by machine. Having all this machine-readable ecosystem is very important to enrich the content, to make it more discoverable and more transparent. As we start pointing like that to more granularity to different elements of the papers, to data sets, for example, it becomes very important to acknowledge exactly the specific contributions of individual researchers. And that's something that we've been adamant about at least at the Nature Publishing Group since 2009 is trying to provide author contribution statements. We've done that, and I think Orchid has given us and other publishers an impetus to actually do things better. This is basically a very, very quick summary of these author contribution statements that we've been asking, this is in particular at the Nature Journal for the past five years. This text mining analysis was done by Michael Altman at the MIT Libraries, and you really see that some very key types of contributions are dominating. You have a lot of granularity, but you also have very strong contributions that you see again and again. At the moment, it's really rather static because we include that as text in the paper. With Orchid, you start really having this desire of doing a better job and trying to turn this into metadata that can accompany the paper. So there has been a working group that was set up thanks to, in particular, Liz Allen from the Welcome Trust and Amy Brand who was at Harvard and is now at Digital Science, which is a sister company to Nature Publishing Group. I've participated in this working group where we've basically used that data we have on author contributions to establish a taxonomy of contributions. We've done that in collaboration with other publishers, with funders, and with scientists to really trying to help to establish this standard vocabulary and recently, in 2014, that initiative has been amplified thanks to the support of NYSO and CASRI who are two standard promoting organizations. We now have very recently published this taxonomy of author contributions. I think that's a perfect example of something where Orchid can really inspire people to do things better. If you think about it, you now have DOIs with unique identifiers, authors with unique identifiers, and basically to link these taxonomy of contribution, all of which can be queried in a machine-readable format. That really is starting to enrich our scientific record. As I said, I feel it's very important for credit and also for accountability. So this was just one example of the things that can be made possible with unique identifiers like Orchid. I'm sure there will be many more applications coming in the future. So I'm going to stop here. It's been a pleasure talking to you even though I'm in a completely remote location. My email address is there. I'm very happy to take further questions. I wish you a very good rest of the conference. Thank you for your attention.