Beyond PIDs:
The importance of open scholarly infrastructure

Ed Pentz
Executive Director
Crossref@epentz

JAPAN OPEN SCIENCE SUMMIT 2021

@CrossrefOrg

●
●
●

●
●

PID provider Open, foundational scholarly
infrastructure: openscholarlyinfrastructure.org
Metadata and services make research outputs
easy to ﬁnd, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
Crossref DOIs are citation identiﬁers: grants,preprints, articles, chapters, proceedings,
standards, reports, protocols, dissertations,reviews, comments (conferences, video, blogs soon).
Research nexus
Open data and APIs to retrieve metadata from>125 million records.
community.crossref.org

Infrastructure
The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities(e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for theoperation of a society or enterprise.
OUP Lexico - https://www.lexico.com/deﬁnition/infrastructurehttps://investinopen.org/●

By “Infrastructure” we mean the sets of services, protocols, standards andsoftware that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions
throughout the research lifecycle – from the earliest phases of research,collaboration and experimentation through data collection and storage, dataorganization, data analysis and computation, authorship, submission, review andannotation, copyediting, publishing, archiving, citation, discovery and more.

●Open infrastructure is the narrower sets of services, protocols, standards andsoftware that can empower communities to collectively build the systems andinfrastructures that deliver new improved collective benefits without
restrictions, and for a healthy global interrelated infrastructure system.

I4OC

What’s in a name?
Smith (2020) The Importance of Hydroxychloroquine in the Fight Against
COVID-19. Mod Chem Appl. 8:277. doi:10.35248/2329-6798.20.8.277

https://doi.org/10.35248/2329-6798.20.8.277

https://api.crossref.org/works/10.35248/2329-6798.20.8.277

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000963

https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000963

PIDs are incorrectly presented as ends inthemselves
The strings themselves inadvertently imbued
with talismanic, magical properties

The PID has become the centre of attention
More focus needed on metadata, services,organisations and infrastructure thatprovide services that solve problems andmake things easier for researchers.

The Principles
of OpenScholarlyInfrastructure
Supporting Open Research
Openscholarlyinfrastructure.org

What is Open Infrastructure?
Governance
●
●
●
●
●
●
●

Coverage across the research enterprise
Stakeholder Governed
Non-discriminatory membershipTransparent operations
Cannot lobby
Living will
Formal incentives to fulﬁl mission & wind-downInsurance●●●●

Open source
Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Patent non-assertion

Sustainability
●
●
●
●
●

Time-limited funds are used only fortime-limited activities
Goal to generate surplus
Goal to create contingency fund to support
operations for 12 months
Mission-consistent revenue generation
Revenue based on services, not datahttps://blog.datadryad.org/
https://ror.org/blog/
https://www.crossref.org/blog

What are the goals● We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships
connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions;a scholarly record that the global community can build on
forever, for the beneﬁt of society.
● The ﬁrst steps to fulﬁll this vision are for all research activities
and outputs, researchers, and organizations to have persistentidentiﬁers and rich, standardized, open metadata available
through human and machine interfaces● The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) will takeus beyond the narrow world of PIDs.