GRID passes the torch to ROR – FAQs

With ROR coming of age and becoming independent from GRID, Digital Science has decided to pass on the torch to ROR and retire GRID from the public space, with a last public release in Q4 of 2021. We’ve created these FAQs to help you understand how this may impact you.

GRID going forward

As ROR is seeded by GRID data, both datasets are almost identical, which makes it easy for users to transition – it is basically a 1:1 mapping. In order to support the transition all currently available releases will remain open.

Following this step, Digital Science will continue to maintain GRID and integrate changes provided via ROR, but will continue to use it for Digital Science internal use cases related to our own projects and products, for example in Dimensions, where the team may need to apply different policies than those ROR may apply.

This change simply changes the context in which GRID is used, while maintaining an open organisation identifier in the form of ROR. The change also frees up some time for the GRID team, allowing them to focus on streamlining data-driven approaches to gathering research insights, and working with the community to develop tools to enable this.

ROR going forward

Following the final public release of GRID data in September 2021, ROR will continue to be responsible for the curation and management of the ROR database, and all edits and additions should be directed to the ROR curation team. ROR will continue to support GRID IDs in its format. 

How will this impact you?

So what does this mean for you, as a current or future user of research organisation identifiers? The ROR team has prepared some basic resources on its support site to help those transitioning from GRID to ROR and will continue to expand those resources in the coming months. If you are a current GRID user and haven’t yet made contact with ROR, the GRID team would be happy to discuss how we can help make the transition to ROR easier. We will ensure that during this transition period, there will be plenty of time and opportunity to engage with the teams and find support as and when this is required for your use case.

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The last week of January 2021 saw the annual PIDapalooza festival of persistent identifiers go virtual. Armed with a ‘tour shirt’ that boasts such epic previous host cities as Reykjavik, Lisbon and Dublin, my cafetière of coffee and I settled in for a 24-hour bonanza of all things PID.

After a warm welcome from the organisers and the traditional lighting of the eternal flame (“surely if it is eternal it is already alight,” I hear you say – and it is, in our hearts. But it needs plugging in for the festival…) the delegates got down to business. Just over 24 hours worth of identifier-related treats had been packed into concurrent streams, with many sessions taking place in languages local to the least sleepy time zone at any given point in the programme, adding to the inclusive nature of the conference. But what is PIDapalooza all about?

Where there are data, there are persistent identifiers. Whether that data is related to research information, or whether it is related to other items that need classification, categorisation or organisation, persistent identifiers are a form of metadata that allow us to better understand the context of a single piece of information.

Think about it in the context of your favourite music library. When you import your music, each individual file is organised by track number and album. There is however a whole raft of additional metadata that you may not be aware of. These additional layers of detail allow you to collate your songs in different ways. Let’s say I wanted to kitchen-disco dance to the songs that soundtracked my undergraduate years. All I need to do is search my music by the year 2005, and my library will return all the songs I own that were released then. Perhaps I’m in the mood for some epic prog-rock to power me through these long pandemic days. No problem, as the genre tag will do the hard work for me. All this is possible thanks to rich and accurate metadata; the information that describes a file with fine details that add context.

PIDapalooza is a conference unlike any other. From the aforementioned tour t-shirts, to the PIDaparty sessions, the conference allows people to naturally network, communicate and collaborate, and interact with speakers and other delegates. This year I hosted a frantic session of Jeo-PID-y, a game show all about PIDs based on the US show with a very similar name. Devised by Alice Meadows of NISO, Helena Cousijn of DataCite and myself, the game was an opportunity to test your PID knowledge, meet others via hosting platform Crowdcast and in Slack, and learn about some ‘new PIDs on the block’ (I’m not even sorry). Thanks to a combination of enthusiastic participants and four excellent team captains in the form of Maria Gould from ROR, Matt Buys from DataCite, Gabriela Mejias from ORCiD, and Rachael Lammey from CrossRef, the game was educational and entertaining. Rachael’s team, the Glorious GUPRIs, took the crown after some strategic betting of entirely fictional money in Final Jeopardy.

PIDapalooza brings together users of persistent identifiers from a range of different professions, each facing similar challenges, all sharing best practice and novel ways to overcome these hurdles. This year’s programme featured a session led by Jonathan Clark from The DOI Foundation and Raymond Drewry from MovieLabs and the Entertainment Identifier Registry, or EIDR. They shared the successes and challenges of creating and maintaining PIDs for the entertainment industry. Complete with movie quiz, the duo answered questions about how to attach unique identifiers to different versions of movies, such as director’s cuts and extended editions, and how to categorise movies in different languages. When we think about research information, it is clear to see the parallels between the challenges that other industries face and those we encounter within research. One message shone through multiple sessions, however; the better the metadata, the more we can do with that incredible depth of information.

At Digital Science, we have overcome our own PID-related challenges and continue to work with our community to best integrate PIDs in our work. When creating the Dimensions database, the team needed a disambiguated research organisation identifier in order to categorise research outputs by institution. Enter GRID, the Global Research Identifier Database. This free-to-use identifier adds another layer of metadata to your research outputs, and can also be incorporated into new systems. As part of the curation process, GRID brings together other persistent identifiers, and even adds more richness to the metadata available about each institute by including geographic location, NUTS3 region codes, and much more for greater analytical potential of research information.

GRID is used in Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare, and Symplectic Elements, but its reach doesn’t stop there. Where there is PIDapalooza, there is a pride of ‘ROR-ing’ lions close by. GRID seed data was used to help build the Research Organization Registry, or ROR. ROR’s first annual community meeting took place in Dublin just before PIDapalooza in January 2019. As one of the newest PIDs, it made sense for a stakeholder-governed identifier community to meet around PIDapalooza, as the same people would attend both events. The ROR community meeting allowed users and future adopters to learn more about how the ROR project is progressing, and what the next steps are. Being driven by the community, it was another great opportunity to hear about new use cases and learn about the priorities of different users in between the quarterly community calls.

Though ROR and GRID are well known within the PID community, it is easy to forget that researchers may not know much about them. Just over two years ago, fresh out of academia, I had to Google what a PID was when I joined Digital Science and started working with the ROR project team. Little did I know that everything, from the names I assigned to my individual experiments to the digital object identifiers (DOIs) attached to papers, were forms of persistent identifier. As Kathryn Kaiser said in her excellent wrap-up, perhaps researchers don’t need to know the ins and outs of the infrastructure of research information. They just need to know that good metadata means that the rest of the research world can make better connections between pieces of research information, and we need to continue to understand our research community in order to know how best to support them in adopting these.

The eternal flame may have been unplugged for another year, but I already look forward to reconvening with this community in January 2022 to celebrate the progress that has been made and share what we have learned along the way.

The post Rockin’ In The PID World At PIDapalooza appeared first on Digital Science.

It’s in the last year that lots of exciting developments have happened since making the dataset openly available. One of those key developments is that ORCID, the unique identifier for scientific and other academic authors and contributors, has added support for GRID.

Just like Digital Science, ORCID strives to provide services that are community responsive. As well as GRID, they support a range of other organisation identifiers and are working on functionality to enable their members to specify which organisation identifier(s) they use when making connections. ORCID plan to expose these identifiers in their API and user interface. ORCID are also working to enhance how their data model handles affiliations.

Dr Andres Mori, Head of Data Services, Digital Science said:

“Taking control over how your institution’s name is used across research systems is crucial to improving workflows and communication. It’s great to be working with ORCID to make this a reality.”

To hear the latest news on GRID, you can follow them on Twitter using @GRID_ac. Andres is also presenting on a panel at THOR tomorrow, if you want to find out more.

The post ORCID Have Added Support for Digital Science’s GRID appeared first on Digital Science.

In this report, we explore the question of ‘location’ and, in particular, how we consistently identify the organisations that host and facilitate the research process. Using a corpus of sample research articles from the leading open-access journal PLOS, we demonstrate how much attribution to research organisations varies in author affiliations, how this kind of data can be aligned with a reference dataset (GRID), and the potential of analyses resulting from the data integration.

Download Now

The post Discovery and Analysis of Global Research Trends appeared first on Digital Science.

During the turmoil of 2016 Digital Science made a decision as to what type of business we wanted to be in the future. The decision was in no way out of step with who we were or who we always wanted to be, but 2016 seemed to make it all the more important to say it and to ensure that it is known. We not only want to be a business that grows and gives back to the broad research community from which it came, but we also want to embody the culture of our colleagues in research. Digital Science is  a place where anyone can work, regardless of their country of origin, regardless of their gender, faith, sexuality or any other appropriate diversity criteria. Lots of companies have such things written in their company handbook, but embracing these ideas and really making them part of the DNA of the business is another thing. It means finding innovative solutions to tough problems around hiring; it means committing to visa applications and to supporting people who want to move to work with other talented people; it means reviewing policies that have stood for a number of years and really looking hard to see if there is a way to make some things fairer.

In 2016, Digital Science turned six years old, but I hope that we also reached a different level of maturity as a company. It’s difficult to describe Digital Science as a startup anymore but from the energy of staff in the company, the will to do things professionally yet pragmatically and cleverly, the belief in our mission to improve the experience of researchers in their work, it is difficult to see how we’ve fundamentally changed from the startup that we were six years ago. I think that the main change I’ve seen is that we feel an even greater responsibility than ever “to do the right thing”. It’s difficult to put into words what that really means, but improving our professional services at the centre of Digital Science is important; ensuring that when any of the portfolio companies releases a new version of their product, the attention to detail is staggering; the time spent working with clients to really understand their problems and the willingness of clients to spend time with our teams is gratifying.

Below, you’ll read about the fantastic year our portfolio companies have had. Here, I just wanted to mention a couple of successes within the broader Digital Science community. Digital Science completed investments into TetraScience and Transcriptic, two exciting new startups in the US, each of which is well placed to change the way that labs work in the future. We published four Digital Research Reports, collaborated with Figshare and Springer Nature on a report on the State of Open Data, released the Digital Research Yearbook at the Royal Society in October, produced a white paper on the “New Research Data Mechanics” and worked with the UArctic collaboration to show how much work is being done on “Arctic Science”.

As we look forward to 2017, the amount of exciting and innovative projects just seems to multiply (perhaps slightly alarmingly to those on the team here at Digital Science)…

The Digital Science team wishes you all the best for 2017…keep watching this space!

Highlights from our portfolio

Altmetric

2016 was a big year for Altmetric with lots of new partnerships, projects and announcements! The year started with Summon discovery service adding Altmetric badges to their database. NISO announced the new Data Quality Code of Conduct for altmetrics in February which both Euan and Jean had a hand in putting together. Our first partnership of the year came in March with IEEE adding Altmetric badges into their Xplore Digital Library. We announced the very first Altmetric Research Grant in March which was awarded to Dr Lauren Cadwallader, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, in June. Our first major update to our functionality came in April when Altmetric data for Books was added to the Explorer. Later that month we partnered with Figshare giving users the ability to see Altmetric data on their database. Our summer began with the launch of our next big functionality update: the inclusion of Scopus Citations to details pages in the Altmetric Explorer. In July we had two more major integrations with the announcement that Profiles RNS and ÜberResearch added Altmetric badges to their databases. In September we added Syllbus data from the Open Syllabus Project to the Explorer showing where individual books had been included in Syllabi in over 4,000 institutions worldwide. Our biggest milestone of the year was the release of Version 2 of the Explorer for Institutions in September which features a completely revamped user experience including new visualisations, reporting and searching features. Our last big partnerships of the year were with Pubmed Central and IOP Publishing, both integrating Altmetric data. As always we finished the year with our Top 100 list of the most discussed research of the year with none other than President Barack Obama at the top spot!

BioRAFT

With over 160,000 safety training courses delivered to scientists worldwide through BioRAFT, 2016 was a great year for safety and for the BioRAFT team. In addition to adding new life sciences, higher education, and medical device customers, BioRAFT kept its ongoing promise to the community to continually improve its suite of software and services. We released major enhancements to our IBC Biological Registration, Inspection, and Equipment Modules, and implemented powerful new dashboards that provide real-time, actionable data for EHS and for leadership across our customers’ organizations. BioRAFT also continued to be a major supporter of the EHS community through our thought leadership series and sponsorship of industry events: we hosted major educational webinars including one on The New View, a methodology for building safety conscious organizations, and attended 21 conferences/symposia. Of course, this all was accomplished by our amazing team, which increased by fifty percent in 2016, working closely in collaboration with our passionate and dedicated customers. We can’t wait to see what we will accomplish together in 2017!

Figshare

Whilst 2016 was not everyone’s favourite year, from our point of view it was the most successful across a variety of measures. We now have over 3 million public articles, with 26 million page views, 7.5 million downloads and over 10 thousand citations. This year was spent building some great new features including Collections, Public Projects, Altmetric & Github integration, curation workflows, reporting and statistic dashboards, new file viewers and a number of search and discovery enhancements. We announced over 20 new partnerships with institutions and publishers including Amsterdam University, Royal Society Publishing, Springer Nature and Carnegie Mellon University, to name a few. Understanding the importance of working with the research community, we attended and spoke at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. We also expanded our community conference figshare fest, holding four events around the world – many more to come in 2017. In partnership with Digital Science and Springer Nature we published the first, “State of Open Data report” featuring the results of a survey of over 2,000 researchers on their attitude to data publishing featuring contributions from thought leaders all over the world. We look forward to an even better 2017!

GRID

During the first year we released the GRID database to the public, we added over 17,000 new records through manual curation, three new external identifiers to make it easier to link out to other datasets, and released our own RDF version of GRID for download to help out our linked data enthusiasts. We have already planned a host of exciting new improvements for the upcoming year. We are looking into increasing coverage of our current external identifiers, especially Wikidata IDs, as well as including some new ones to our already comprehensive coverage. Most importantly, we decided to further support the open data community in 2017 by making changes to the GRID license and going CC0, making it even easier to use in conjunction with other open datasets and software.

Labguru

This year at Labguru we have diversified functionality with our clients and partners, including an improved Samples table for experiments. Large institutions continue to adopt Labguru, as well as a number of academic research institutions, biotech companies and government labs across the US, the Netherlands, France and Australia. The Labguru team will be out on a number of road trips in 2017 so do look out for us.

Overleaf

2016, Wow!  What a year full of growth and excitement at Overleaf. We’re happy to share that as of the end of 2016, Overleaf has over 500,000 registered users, and over 6,000,000 documents have been created using Overleaf. That’s a lot of work and brain-power! We have 175 advisors promoting and supporting Overleaf around the world; over 20 institutional partnerships – and more to announce in early 2017; and over 20 publishing partnerships – which includes hundreds of journal authoring templates and simplified, 1-click submission links. Our authors can now write, collaborate, and submit to a number of journals with 1 click, directly from Overleaf! We have happily posted 64 blog articles; reached 33,398 Twitter followers and tweeted 1,265 nuggets of gold! We thank all of our incredible users and supporters – and we’re fired up to continue the incredible fun and momentum in 2017!

ReadCube

As 2016 winds down – we wanted to take this opportunity to send our most sincere thanks to all of our users, partners, collaborators, and colleagues for being part of the ReadCube & Papers family. This year, we surpassed all of our goals, and we could not have done it without your support. While there were many special moments this year – here are some of our favorites…

• Over 40 million people used ReadCube and Papers technology to read, discover and manage their literature in 2016! That is almost three times as much since last year!
• 219 million articles were read in ReadCube this year! That’s over 611,000 each day!
• Our readers spent over 1534 years’ worth of time reading in ReadCube in 2016 which is almost 4.4 years reading each day!
• Over 52 million articles are now available as Enhanced PDFs within ReadCube’s web, desktop and mobile applications.
• We have partnered with another 15 publishers and industry partners for a total of over 85 to date! New partners this year include: HighWire Press, Ingenta Connect, Taylor & Francis, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, The Geological Society of London, The Electrochemical Society and Liverpool University Press.

You can check out all the highlights in our end of year rundown via http://rdcu.be/n7jV and stay tuned for updates on all the exciting projects planned for the upcoming year via @readcube

Symplectic

Symplectic has had an exciting year in which we turned 13 years old! Our team managed three successful conferences, in Cambridge (UK), Melbourne, and Duke (Durham, NC). Elements v5.0 was released to rapturous critical acclaim, with a new UI and Assessment Module. We launched a new hosting service, with uptake from institutions around the world, and released a popular open-source ‘Bootstrapped’ VIVO theme at the VIVO conference in Denver. Symplectic now have clients in 2/3 of the THE World Top 25 Universities!

TetraScience

2016 has wildly exceeded TetraScience’s expectations. Our customer base has grown 5x, network 6x, and revenue 10x. One of our main highlights was launching a new product, TetraScience Utilization, further delivering on our vision to provide a deep and dynamic mission control for R&D labs. These accomplishments are directly attributed to the hard work of our phenomenal team. With loftier ambitions in 2017, we hope to add 10 members to our team in Q1 alone across multiple functions (engineering, marketing, operations, and sales).

ÜberResearch

The third year of operations for ÜberResearch saw lots of exciting developments, in several different directions. The Dimensions database brought in many new sources, bringing the new total to over 3.4 million projects from 250 funders, and more than $1 Trillion of funding! The addition of new funding sources will continue into 2017 and beyond, and forms the backbone for not just Dimensions for Funders, but also the recently launched Dimensions for Publishers, as well as a new Dimensions interface for researchers coming in early 2017. 2016 also saw the integration of the Altmetric attention score into Dimensions for clients who use both platforms – bringing an extra splash of colour to the publications data in Dimensions with the Altmetric donuts!

The post 2016: A Year of Global Investments, Grants and Growth appeared first on Digital Science.

“We can’t identify a university in the Santa Claus Village, as their research is top secret, but we do have a GRID record for the University of Lapland.”

More tales you never knew about GRID (Global Research Identifier Database)… their team is spread out over London, Swansea, Manchester and Cologne, and they speak a plethora of languages including German, Spanish, English, Kurdish, Python and Ruby!

The post Top Secret Research at the University of Santa Claus Village #digiscixmas appeared first on Digital Science.

GRID’s comprehensive database of over 66,000 global research organizations now available under a CC0 license.

The CC0 license means that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse GRID data for any purposes, without restriction under copyright or database law, similar to many open source software licenses. The CC0 license removes any hurdles associated with the current license. Digital Science hopes that the open data community can benefit from using GRID, allowing seamless integrations with other open datasets and software tools.

GRID is a free, easy-to-use online database that opens up information about research organizations around the world to data scientists, developers and innovators within academic and commercial organizations. The GRID dataset addresses the problem of messy and inconsistent data on research institutions, ensuring that each entity is included correctly and only once.

Dr Andres Mori, Data Project Lead, Digital Science said:

“Discussions around the use of persistent identifiers are high on the agenda for the scholarly community. There is a clear need to bridge the gap in scholarly infrastructure with an open institutional identifier database, one that can be used as a solution to disambiguate researcher affiliations. We are certain that the open data community will benefit from the increased ease of use of GRID and that this will support their projects going forward.”

GRID goes CC0.

GRID now joins other Digital Science products like Figshare as a promoter of CC0 usage as the standard license for the open sharing of datasets. From January 2017, copies of the monthly GRID database release will be dedicated to the public domain and uploaded to Figshare.

The post Digital Science Releases GRID Under CC0 License appeared first on Digital Science.

Our Consultancy Team is led by Professor Jonathan Adams, a highly experienced government science policy advisor, founder of Evidence Ltd and creator of the UK Higher Education Research Yearbook. Jonathan co-authored the book with Martin Szomszor, Consultant Data Scientist at Digital Science, and founder of the Global Research Identifier Database (GRID).

Pictures highlighting the event can be found below. To request a sample of the Yearbook, email our Consultancy team here.

The post Digital Research Yearbook Launch Event #DigitalResearchYearbook appeared first on Digital Science.

GRID’s extensive database of over 63,000 organisations associated with research is now available as Open Linked Data

15th August, 10:40am UK time  

We are pleased to announce that Digital Science’s Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) is now available as RDF, joining a wide range of other prestigious data sources on the web of data. By using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to describe its data, GRID facilitates interlinking with other datasets using a well defined vocabulary based on human conceptualisation – commonly referred to as an ontology. This enables consumers to readily integrate GRID data with their own datasets and make use of the extensive metadata available covering geography, typology, organisational hierarchies and relationships.

GRID’s persistent identifiers provide a mechanism to unambiguously link data about research artefacts (such as articles, grants, patents, etc) to relevant organisations. Because identifiers are never destroyed, only updated, users can be confident that their data will remain up-to-date even when an organisation changes name, owners or even location. Moreover, GRID’s unique collection of references to other identification systems (such as the Open Funder Registry, ISNI, Orgref, Wikidata and more) supplies even more power to users, enabling them to easily integrate data from multiple sources in different data formats.

The development of GRID’s RDF capability has benefited strongly from collaboration with the VIVO community. Over the past few months, Digital Science and VIVO have been working together to incorporate GRID into the open source semantic research discovery platform. One of the many challenges faced by the VIVO community is how to model researcher affiliations such that unambiguous identifiers are used to model how academics are related to the institutions they work at. By incorporating GRID into VIVO, a rich network can be established linking academics to organisations via the articles they write, the grants they receive and the positions they occupy. As part of the GRIDs RDF activities, a mapping between GRID and VIVO ontologies will be published.

For the technical audience, you can find the GRID ontology definition at http://www.grid.ac/ontology. GRID ids can be used to formulate semantic web URIs that support consumption of linked data via content negotiation. For example the GRID id for the University of Southampton, UK is grid.5491.9 and it’s corresponding semantic web address is <http://www.grid.ac/institutes/grid.5491.9>. To request RDF XML for this resource, use the *NIX command:

curl -L -H 'Accept: application/rdf+xml' http://www.grid.ac/institutes/grid.5491.9

The post Digital Science’s GRID Now Available As Linked Open Data appeared first on Digital Science.

Last week, I spoke at an ALPSP seminar that was jointly organized by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and ably moderated by William Kilbride, who’s the Executive Director of the DPC. Kilbride stated two of the challenges that the DPC faces in its mission to ensure preservation of the scholarly record, are difficulties in engaging with publishers and getting caught up in the Open Access (OA) debate. Specifically, he was interested in knowing how publishers think about preservation of the scholarly record. Does the industry think that the problem is solved? Does it need to be solved? Obviously, it does.

The subject of my talk was, Transformations in Scholarly Communications. That’s a pretty broad title given the storied history of the industry. I eschewed the temptation to give a history lecture and chose instead to focus on how scholarly communication is currently changing. Specifically, I talked about the growth of open science and open data, the reasons why there is currently a surge of interest, and how we might change current workflows and incentive structures to enable it. Specifically, I make the argument that data sharing workflows have to be as simple and intuitive as possible, and fully integrate things like metadata creation and structure compliance from the point at which data is created. The slides for my talk as well as the audio is available, along with all the others from the day, at the event page on alpsp.org. You can play a fun game of guess when the slide transition happened.

Like all the best events, last week’s seminar had a diverse lineup of speakers including librarians, archivists, publishers, technologists and academics. Robert Gurney, Professor of Earth Observation Science at the University of Reading gave an excellent talk on the subject of open data in climate science. With all the concentration on the behaviours of those in the life sciences, I think that the perspectives of those in the physical sciences are occasionally overlooked. Particularly, the idea that researchers don’t want to share data for fear of being scooped is a distinctly alien one to Professor Gurney, who explained how the sharing of data is inherent to the way his discipline operates.

Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA, who I seem to only see at conferences despite the fact he happens to work five minutes walk from where I live, talked about maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record. I’ve heard that turn of phrase a lot over the past couple of years, but usually in reference to the threat of so-called predatory publishers. Burnhill didn’t talk about that, instead he pointed out that because we’re moving towards a scholarly communication system that treats data and other digital outputs as part of the legitimate scholarly record, we have to make sure that those resources are both preserved and conserved. That is to say, for data citation to be meaningful, the link to the data must point to a resource that still exists and the content of that resource cannot have changed. The popular terms for these phenomena are ‘link rot’ and ‘content drift’. Burnhill points out that by design, the web is dynamic and content changes over time. As a remedy, he made the pleasant analogy that like fish, data must be flash frozen when captured to preserve it.

Other highlights from the day included the Regional Director for Europe at ORCID, Josh Brown’s observation that it’s already possible to assign identifying metadata for researchers, institutions, grants and data to specific research projects, which we can define or specify by the DOI of the version of record.

Wendy White, Associate Director of the Hartley Library at Southampton University identified the theme of the day, which as she put it was about being in the researcher space…[to]…capture the most effective metadata. In other words, the need to integrate data sharing and preservation into researchers workflows. At the same time, both she and Sarah Callaghan, Senior Research Scientist at STFC and Editor-in-Chief of Data Science Journal reminded us that the purpose of open data is to enable it to be understandable and reusable in both the short and long term.

White put the challenge into context when she asked whether a future historian, a thousand years from now might be able to read and understand a digital copy of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Aside from technical and language considerations, there’s also cultural context. Would a person 1,000 years from now know what the UN was, or indeed what the concept of a right is? Clearly, if we’re serious about preserving the scholarly record, we’re only just beginning to tackle the challenges that are involved.

The post Standing on the Digits of Giants: Another Excellent Cross-Stakeholder Discussion in Scholarly Communication appeared first on Digital Science.