Demystifying the Automagical: An Honest Appraisal of the Challenges in Persistent Identifiers and Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Friday May 24, 2024
From 2:45pm to 3:15pm
Document
To many researchers, the Rube Goldberg machine that's kicked into action when they publish or share their work is inscrutable. PIDs are "minted", copies are pushed to servers and repositories, citations are created and duplicated. Institutions and librarians are telling them all the important things they need to know while they think about pivoting to the next project. Meanwhile, institutions, funders, and other service providers see this stream of data and presume they can easily drink from it. They're looking to fill their cups with clean drinking water, and instead they are on the receiving end of a dirty fire hose.
Open infrastructure has incredible potential to make life easier for researchers, authors, publishers, and institutions alike. But, too often, the optimism masks very real challenges inherent in scholarly communications. Do we have a good understanding of where metadata goes? Do we have realistic expectations for authors when it comes to stewardship of their works? Do we actually understand how persistent identifiers work? Do we know who maintains them or how those organizations differ? Can we talk about these things without stepping in existing political and social issues at our institutions? Can we (should we) trust this volume of data is going to good use?
This talk will explore very real problems and contexts in the space of open scholarly infrastructure. It will discuss the often-ignored connections between its maintainers and the potentially outsized expectations of its adopters. But, uh, in a fun way.
Speakers
Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian at University of New Brunswick Libraries; Publishing Specialist & Metadata Liaison with the Public Knowledge Project
University of New Brunswick Libraries; Public Knowledge Project